Family Agriculture, Sustainable Development and Ethnographic Linear Programming - A Review

Abstract

Family agriculture (FA) is a diversified and multifunctional group both in ecological and socio-economic terms, representing around 90% of the farms, 53% of the agricultural land worldwide and accounting for 50% of the global agricultural production. However, FA faces some problems such as difficult subsistence, poor access to markets, rising production costs and climate change effects. These require urgent sustainable solutions, given the importance of FA as a source of livelihood and income to many poor families and its high contribution to the economic growth, the world food production and security. Fulfilling sustainable development goals (SDGs) and reducing poverty implies supporting FA in the improvement of its productivity, income, well-being of the households and resource maintenance. The challenge is to find ways to allocate the limited and often degraded resources available to different production activities, so to improve the farms’ performances, maintain their specificity (productive, reproductive and communitarian functions) and their drive towards sustainability. This article represents a small contribution to overcoming this challenge. It performs an integrative systematic literature review on modeling the functioning of FA households from a sustainability perspective, through ethnographic linear programming (ELP). It also allows for the development of an inexistent body of literature that links FA, sustainability and ELP and allows the uncovering of new ways of thinking about FA (practices, policies, technologies, productive and reproductive activities and community social norms), and its pathways to reach sustainability. Ultimately, this study generates knowledge about the conceptual framework that is to be used and about the agenda for future research. The review methodology that was applied consisted of diverse steps, including the identification of the search terms and the accessed databases, the definition of the criteria for eligibility and exclusion of articles and the bibliometric analysis and review of the final list of the 46 selected studies.