Assessing Sustainable Agriculture Development Status in Iran and Offering of Sustainability Approaches

Zoning of agriculture sustainability can be illustrated the status of sustainability in different regions and also provided the comparison capability and identification of advantage and disadvantage properties. Today, various methodologies were used to evaluate status of sustainability in agriculture section. To evaluate the agricultural sustainability the relative advantage method was used in this study. For this purpose, 5 indexes were considered which included: agriculture resources, agriculture development, environment, rural societies and education based on 60 indicators. The total sustainability of agriculture development was calculated by sum of the 5 indexes and subsequently, the status of sustainable agriculture was zoned in GIS maps. Based on geographical zoning, Iran was weak in terms of sustainability in agriculture resources, environment, rural society and agriculture education but it had moderate sustainability in term of agriculture development. Generally, it can be stated that Khorasan Razavi and Fars provinces had the highest sustainability in all indexes except rural society. Ghom province was identified as most unsustainable province in comparison with other provinces in all studied indexes. The results of sustainable agriculture development in Iran showed that Iran had unsustainable or weak sustainable status in development of sustainable agriculture because only 5 provinces from 30 provinces had high and moderate sustainability and others had low sustainability or un-sustainability. With consider to identification of advantage and disadvantage for sustainable agriculture development in every location, future schematization can be focused on improvement of disadvantage properties and indexes which had low sustainability in every location.