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Abstract
Farming system design needs to adopt a landscape perspective in order to better respond
to sustainability issues at the regional scale. Thus, we built a method at the regional scale to design
agricultural land systems accounting for field characteristics and farm diversity, current farming
systems and cropping systems, and the ecological processes (e.g. pollution of water bodies) at the
regional scale. This method encompasses the definition of a farm typology to approach farmer's
decision processes in term of cropping system choice. This farm typology is integrated within a
regional bio-economic model that produces new agricultural land systems by simulating farmers'
decision processes in term of cropping system choices at plot scale, within the entire region. These
new agricultural land systems are assessed with a set of indicators to provide information on their
response to sustainability issues. This model coupled to the indicators are used within a scenario
route to provide information on the relevance of combination of agronomic, economic, social and
environmental levers to improve the contribution of agriculture to sustainable development. The
method is applied in Guadeloupe for prototyping agricultural land systems that improve the
response of agriculture to economic, social and environmental challenges with levers such as "agro
ecological crop-gardening cropping systems", "energy crop", "changes in crop subsidies" and
"availability of experienced workforce in farms". This method could be used in the Caribbean
islands to help decision-makers improve the response of agriculture to sustainability challenges
such as reaching food self-sufficiency, increasing employment and decreasing environmental
impacts of agriculture. Coupling this approach to land use change study could provide a way of
designing future sustainable islands.