Challenges Threatening Agricultural Sustainability in Central Asia: Status and Prospect

Agriculture provides humanity with the most basic products to sustain life and raw materials for production, closely linking human society and nature together. The sustainable development of agriculture, an inevitable choice to maintain long-term social stability, steady economic growth, and ecological security, is the key to the coordinated development of the economy, society, and environment in developing Central Asia economies. We attempted to evaluate the trend of agricultural sustainability in Central Asia between 2002 and 2017 by adopting analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight method in this study. It was found that the overall sustainability level of regional agriculture is rising, which is mainly driven by economic progress, with social and ecological dimensions contributing much less. Accordingly, we advanced four suggestions: enhancing water productivity, optimizing planting techniques, improving agricultural cooperatives, and promoting digital land management to boost the agricultural sustainability of the region.