Assessing Agri-Food Start-Ups Sustainability in Peri-Urban Agriculture Context

Abstract

Latest international directives indicate the need for sustainable development, linking socio-economic and environmental aspects, to reach the goals set by Agenda 2030. In this context, peri-urban agriculture can represent the opportunity to increase cities’ sustainability, improving their liveability level, fulfilling a crucial social part since it assures new sources of job opportunities and territorial requalification. This study presents a peri-urban requalification experience, conducted in Milan, Italy, where, within the European funded project OpenAgri, eight agri-food start-ups began their activities in a peri-urban area at the southern gates of the city. The study aims to assess and evaluate these start-ups’ sustainability using the Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems (SAFA), which considers four sustainability pillars: Good governance, economic resilience, environmental integrity and social well-being. The application of SAFA indicators to the eight start-ups revealed their positive aspects and some limitations, typical of some not structured enterprises. The research describes a scalable and replicable example of peri-urban agriculture’s potentiality in solving environmental, social and economic issues and tests FAO’s SAFA framework, which is still unexplored in this sustainability assessment context.