The value of public data for assessing sustainability: The case of Mexican entrepreneurs and the rural census.

In a context where socio-economic and environmental challenges characterise food systems, the need to evaluate their sustainability has come to the fore. A range of frameworks for the evaluation of sustainable food systems has been developed. Such frameworks differ in their coverage, level of assessment and indicators’ precision. This creates barriers for benchmarking and in the comparison of sustainability performance worldwide. As a response to these challenges, FAO developed the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems (SAFA) framework, which aims to harmonize existing assessment tools and facilitate more comparable results globally. This chapter examines whether rural entrepreneurs’ sustainability can be evaluated using the SAFA framework and public data, in the context of Mexico. Results suggest that, although public data from a rural census does not allow a comprehensive evaluation of sustainability, it facilitates the evaluation of almost two-thirds of SAFA’s indicators and could be helpful in the quest to overcome some sustainability evaluation challenges.