Ustainable food systems (FS) require providing food and other goods and services to humans satisfying food security, right to food, income, social justice and resilience, without degrading human health and hiving high environmental performance. The environmental performance of FS can be evaluated using Life Cycle Assessment. However, research on the impact that FS activities, e.g. crop production have on the capacity of farm-based agroecosystems to provide goods and services to humans is still incipient. Our underlying aim was to understand how FS impact on the provision of agroecosystem services and how this relates to the environmental performance of FS, as a basis for supporting decision-making on how to make FS more sustainable. We propose the Agroecosystem Service Capacity (ASC) as a method for assessing farmbased agroecosystem services, it builds on the Ecosystem Service Matrix by Burkhard et al. (2009) and assesses land cover classes against 20 agroecosystem services. The method was applied to eighteen farmbased agroecosystems in Bolivia and Kenya. Here we present two examples for exploring its potentials and limitations. The ASC operates on the basis of land cover class units and permits the calculation of an aggregate ASC-index for farm-based agroecosystems forming part of a specific FS.

The ongoing expansion of agro-industrial food systems is associated with severe socio-ecological problems. For a closer look at the socio-ecological impacts, we analyze the capacity of six food systems to provide farm-based agroecosystem services with the Agroecosystem Service Capacity (ASC) approach. At the same time, we analyze how food systems affect the management of common pool resources (CPR). Our findings show that indigenous peoples and agroecological food systems can have up to three times the ASC-index of agro-industrial food systems. Through their contribution to the sustainable management of cultural landscapes with robust institutions for the management of CPRs, food systems contribute to socio-ecological integrity. On the other hand, regional and agro-industrial food systems with a lower ASC-index contribute less to socio-ecological integrity, and they undermine and open up common property institutions for robust CPR management. As a result, they appropriate (or grab) access to CPRs that are vital for food systems with higher ASC-indexes resulting from a robust management of CPRs. Strengthening a robust management of CPRs could put a halt to the ongoing expansion of food systems with a low ASC-index by replacing them with a high ASC-index to prevent an exacerbation of the current socio-ecological situation.

Food system activities have modified 40% of the Earth’s terrestrial surface. These activities affect the sustainability of food systems – and their ability to provide agroecosystem services. Here, we compare three food systems in Bolivia. One is agro-industrial (soybean), one is indigenous to a Guarani community (maize and beans), and one is an agroecological, horticulture-based food system. We use the Agroecosystem Service Capacity (ASC) approach, which is based on a list of 23 agroecosystem services that allow the ASC index of farm-based agroecosystems to be estimated. Our findings show that agroecological (ASC = 2.57) and indigenous (ASC = 2.43) farm-based agroecosystems have a higher capacity to provide farm-based agroecosystem services than the agro-industrial (ASC = 0.82). This capacity differs because farmers in the agroecological and indigenous farm-based agroecosystems achieve a higher structural diversity and know how to use more agroecosystem services. These results could promote more sustainable food systems by fostering agricultural landscapes that provide a diversity of farm-based agroecosystem services.