Assessing farm sustainability with value oriented methods

Agricultural policy makers aim to combinestrong economic performance with a sustainable use of naturalresources. An important step is to move from trying to definesustainability towards developing concrete tools for measuringand promoting achievements in sustainability. Hence,sustainability assessment is inevitably based on strongsimplifications both of the theoretical paradigm and of thecharacteristics of systems of concern. The most knownapproaches to assess sustainability performance are burdenorientated: they assess the costs or potential harm of resourceuse. These burden-oriented approaches focus on the level ofenvironmental impacts caused by an economic activitycompared to another set of environmental impacts, whilevalue-oriented impact assessment analyses how much valuehas been created with this set of environmental impacts ascompared with the use of these resources by other companies.In this paper, an outline of the possibilities and limitations ofvalue-oriented methods to assess farm sustainability will bediscussed.