Sustainability assessment of sugarcane production systems: SustenAgro Decision Support System

The concept of agricultural sustainability could be summarized as the ability of agricultural systems to maintain their production in the long term without depleting the available resources for future uses. This study proposes a decision support system for assessing the sustainability of the agricultural production and industrial processing of sugarcane in south-central Brazil by providing information structured according to criteria and indicators in the environmental, economic, and social dimensions. The information is organized using three tools: i) spreadsheets for evaluating technological efficiency, production efficiency and costs (Sugarcane Agro-industrial System Efficiency Index); ii) spreadsheet for evaluating sustainability indicators and generating the Sustainability Index; and iii) a combination of both indexes to construct the Sustainability Matrix and Semaphore, and to provide recommendations for sustainability management. The proposed decision support system contains a software (version 1.0, wherein all the information is available in electronic format, which helps to maximize assessment accuracy). Therefore, strategies such as the SustenAgro system, which helps to manage and to guide public policies, can improve the sector and enable suppliers and mills to ensure sustainable growth32The authors gratefully acknowledge the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation / Embrap