An Attempt to Apply Canonical Analysis to Investigate the Dependencies between the Level of Organic Farming Development in Poland and the Chosen Environmental Determinants

Polish organic agriculture has faced rapid growth in the recent two decades. Nevertheless, one may observe considerable discrepancies in organic agriculture development in specific regions of Poland. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the key conditions for this development and its spatial differentiation. Since the relationship between organic farming and the natural environment has a fundamental meaning in this production system, it is crucial to study the development determinants of environmental characters. Thus the paper aims to identify the level of organic farming development in Polish districts and to investigate multidimensional relations between this level and selected environmental conditions. In order to identify the range and direction of those multidimensional relations between the discussed phenomena, canonical analysis was applied. Within the conducted study, proprietary synthetic measures were constructed (using the TOPSIS—Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), and linear ordering of the objects described by a large number of variables was employed. To define the strength and direction of the dependencies among constructed synthetic indices of the level of organic farming development and environmental conditions, a correlation analysis was performed. All 380 districts in Poland were considered as the investigated objects. Based on the variables describing selected environmental conditions, one may explain nearly 26.7% of the variance of variables related to organic agriculture development.

Sustainable Agri-Food Systems: Environment, Economy, Society, and Policy

Agri-food systems (AFS) have been central in the debate on sustainable development. Despite this growing interest in AFS, comprehensive analyses of the scholarly literature are hard to find. Therefore, the present systematic review delineated the contours of this growing research strand and analyzed how it relates to sustainability. A search performed on the Web of Science in January 2020 yielded 1389 documents, and 1289 were selected and underwent bibliometric and topical analyses. The topical analysis was informed by the SAFA (Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems) approach of FAO and structured along four dimensions viz. environment, economy, society and culture, and policy and governance. The review shows an increasing interest in AFS with an exponential increase in publications number. However, the study field is north-biased and dominated by researchers and organizations from developed countries. Moreover, the analysis suggests that while environmental aspects are sufficiently addressed, social, economic, and political ones are generally overlooked. The paper ends by providing directions for future research and listing some topics to be integrated into a comprehensive, multidisciplinary agenda addressing the multifaceted (un)sustainability of AFS. It makes the case for adopting a holistic, 4-P (planet, people, profit, policy) approach in agri-food system studies.