Official Mission Statement

FAO creates and shares critical information about food, agriculture and natural resources in the form of global public goods. But this is not a one-way flow. We play a connector role, through identifying and working with different partners with established expertise, and facilitating a dialogue between those who have the knowledge and those who need it. By turning knowledge into action, FAO links the field to national, regional and global initiatives in a mutually reinforcing cycle. By joining forces, we facilitate partnerships for food and nutrition security, agriculture and rural development between governments, development partners, civil society and the private sector.

Year of Establishment 2013

Key Features

A SAFA is an assessment of the sustainability performance of one or several entities forming part of a value chain rooted in agriculture, forestry, fisheries or aquaculture.

It can address all entities from the site of primary production to that of final sales to the consumer. SAFA can take the form of a self-evaluation for the use by primary producers, food manufacturers and retailers in every part of the world.

Running a SAFA results in a “sustainability polygone” that presents the performance of each of the

21 issues that are crucial to the environmental, social, economic and governance dimensions of sustainability. This “traffic light” representation highlights where an activity performance is unacceptable (red), limited (orange), moderate (yellow), good (light green) or at best (dark green). The thick black line connects the scores between the sustainability issues, unlocking areas of weaknesses. Thanks to this representation, an entity can quickly understand where it stands in the sustainability landscape and where it may need to forge partnerships to improve its performance.

SAFA's themes and corresponding sub-themes describe what sustainability means for those issue areas. Within each sub-theme, SAFA has provided default indicators, which are mapped according to their criteria here in the ITC map. However in addition to these default indicators, an enterprise or group of enterprises may develop additional indicators in order to adapt SAFA to their region, sector or value chain. Default indicators may not be deleted if relevant, but it is encouraged that users add additional indicators to make the assessment more appropriate and thorough.

Facts and Figures

Sustainable development has numerous definitions and its ecological, economic and social principles received universal agreement at the 1992 Earth Summit. One of the summit’s major outcomes, Agenda 21, includes a whole chapter (Chapter 14) on sustainable agriculture and rural development. Today, 106 countries have National Sustainable Development Strategies and at least 120 voluntary sustainability standards are being implemented by the food and agriculture industry. However, developing and implementing an integrated approach to analysing different sustainability dimensions as a coherent whole and integrating them in development or business strategies remains a major challenge.

With a view to offer a fair playing field, FAO built on existing efforts and developed a universal framework for Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems (SAFA). After 5 years of participatory development, SAFA has been presented to FAO member countries on 18 October 2013.

可持续网站对该标准进行了环境、社会、管理、质量和伦理五个维度的分析，该标准在社会维度占比30%，环境维度占比47%，管理维度占比19%，质量维度占比3%，伦理维度占比1%。具体数据及分析请点击以下链接进行查看： Click to see the standards analysis on ITC Sustainability website.

https://sustainabilitymap.org/review-standards?short_list=263