Analysis of the sustainability of agroecosystem management assesses the productive, economic, environmental, and social performance in terms of selected indicators, as affected by configuration of landscape and farm practices and technologies. Sustainable development of agricultural landscapes has become a primary issue for policy-makers, land managers at different hierarchical levels including farmers, advisors, policy-makers, and scientists. This is also reflected in many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identified by the United Nations (UNs) to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all, as part of a new sustainable development agenda started in 2015.

This focus has developed since the oil crisis of the early 1970s, which revealed in an incontrovertible way the limited nature of world resources. In 1992 the UNs Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and produced Agenda 21, a nonbinding, voluntarily implemented action plan proposed by UNs to promote sustainable development at local, national, and global levels. In 2000 a panel of 1360 experts was called by the UNs Secretary-General Kofi Annan to carry out a global study on the state of the environment, named Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA). Initiated in 2001, the objective of the MA was to assess the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and to overview the scientific basis for action needed to enhance the conservation and sustainable use of those systems and their contribution to human well-being. MA experts’ findings provided a state-of-the-art scientific appraisal of the condition and trends in the world’s ecosystems and the services they provide and the options to restore, conserve, or enhance the ecosystems. Modifications imposed by humans to ecosystems resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. Although net gains in human well-being and economic development were achieved, these gains have been obtained at growing costs in the form of the degradation of many ecosystem services. This was recently confirmed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UNs for what concerns land and water resources as well as regarding the ability of the world ecosystems to adsorb greenhouse gas emissions (FAO, 2011).

From a methodological perspective, one of the major MA achievements was the definition and the classification of ecosystem services based on the assumption that it is difficult to protect and sustainably use what is not definable under the common sense, that is, what do we want to protect or use? Following the MA definition, ecosystem services are the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning services (a provisioning service is any type of benefit to people that can be extracted from nature) such as food and water; regulating services (a regulating service is the benefit provided by ecosystem processes that moderate natural phenomena) such as flood and disease control; cultural services (a cultural service is a non-material benefit that contributes to the development and cultural advancement of people, including how ecosystems play a role in local, national, and global cultures) such as spiritual, recreational, and cultural benefits; and supporting services (supporting services allow the Earth to sustain basic life forms, let alone whole ecosystems and people), such as nutrient cycling, that maintain the conditions for life on Earth (MA, 2005).

After defining the object of protection/sustainable use, the MA has defined how to protect/use it, which is the ecosystem approach. Following the MA definition, the ecosystem approach is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water, and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. An ecosystem approach is based on the application of appropriate scientific methodologies focused on levels of biological organization, which encompass the essential structure, processes, functions, and interactions among organisms and their environment. It recognizes that humans, with their cultural diversity, are an integral component of many ecosystems (MA, 2005).

As stated by Pretty (2008), concerns about sustainability in agricultural systems center on the need to develop technologies and practices that do not have adverse effects on ecosystems services, are accessible to and effective for farmers, and lead to improvements in food productivity.

Pretty claims that the key principles to develop sustainable technologies in the agricultural sector are:

1. Integrate and balance biological and ecological processes such as nutrient cycling, nitrogen fixation, soil regeneration, allelopathy, competition, predation, and parasitism into food production processes.
2. Minimize or avoid the use and concentration of those nonrenewable inputs and artificial substances that accumulate faster than they are degraded in the environment, and therefore cause harm to the environment or to the health of farmers, consumers, and domestic animals.
3. Make productive use of the knowledge and skills of farmers, thus improving their self-reliance and substituting human capital for costly external inputs.
4. Make productive use of people’s collective capacities to work together to solve common agricultural and natural resource problems, such as for pest, watershed, irrigation, forest, and credit management, and aggregate supply of products on the markets.

Farming systems can be designed for sustainable performance using a set of performance indicators and using the appropriate type, frequency, and intensity of technologies and practices. In agriculture the priority is feeding a world of projected 9.1 billion people in 2050, without compromising the ability of agroecosystems to persist in the realization of such an objective due to environmental or social harmful side-effects of employed technologies. Then, how to do it?