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This data paper presents a survey conducted in a participatory manner in the territory of Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon. The aim is to understand how global changes are affecting family farmers. In the study area, family farming has been confronted over the past 20 years with the rapid expansion of large-scale monocultures, especially soybean. As part of the Odyssea socio-environmental observatory, academic researchers and family farming organizations entered into a partnership to co-produce data that could be strategically useful for these organizations. A process of co-construction of the expectations allowed priorities to be established and the data collection strategy to be defined. Three levels of analysis were chosen in order to allow an integrated understanding of the dynamics of change: the Santarem Plateau territory, the rural community level (living place recognized by the farmers) and the farmers’ households. Twenty-one farmers, called community researchers, organized in 3 teams, applied a questionnaire through the KoboCollect smartphone application to 544 families in the municipalities of Santarém, Mojuí dos Campos and Belterra. Meetings were previously held in the rural communities and questionnaires were applied with representatives of 32 communities. Data was collected between April and June 2019. The community researchers and academic researchers then came together for two collective sessions of data analysis and interpretation in July and October 2019. Data was standardized and cleaned using SPSS software, between September and December 2019. The metadata and databases are available on the CIRAD dataverse.

This paper investigates the perceptions of a diversity of stakeholders supporting smallholders in the eastern Brazilian Amazon about ecosystem services and agricultural practices. Our results come from 30 semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders in two contrasting municipalities in this region (Paragominas and Irituia). We identified 17 different ecosystem services and 15 agricultural practices. Using a multidimensional scaling (MDS), we differentiated the stakeholders’ perceptions of co-production of ecosystem services. The most mentioned ecosystem services are food supply, regulation of water cycles, soil fertility and erosion prevention. Overall, there is a positive perception that agricultural practices are providing ecosystem services. Biodiversity-based practices are associated with the provision of a broad range of ecosystem services whereas mechanical-chemical practices are mainly linked to food supply. Use of fire, deforestation and use of chemical pesticides are perceived as having most negative effects on the provision of ecosystem services. The type of activity performed by the stakeholders and their municipality are the main factors influencing their perception of ecosystem services co-production. In conclusion, the concept of co-production of ecosystem services related to agroecosystems is relevant as local actors recognize a diversity of effects of agricultural practices on service provision.

This introductory paper provides an overview of the emergence of the concept of 'the multifunctionality of agriculture and rural areas', with particular emphasis on its historical and research dimensions and how it is interrelated with the notion of 'territory'. The paper is based on a state-of-the-art review of the different conceptualizations of the multifunctionality of agriculture and rural areas in policy related discourses. It examines how the concept of multifunctionality was taken on board and operationalized, in scientific analyses, strategic policy analysis and evaluation. In this special issue we focus on policy related analyses and discourses and the related analytical frameworks. We argue that scientific research should dissociate itself from political and interest driven discourses where multifunctionality tends to be primarily defined in economic terms (with a focus on the difference between private and public goods terms), and instead treat multifunctionality as a valuable conceptual framework. This paper emphasizes the important analytical and strategic links between multifunctionality and sustainability. In so doing it also closely links the notions of territory and territorial development with those of multifunctionality and sustainability. The adoption of a wider territorial development perspective has several implications in terms of governance and policies and these will be discussed. Theoretical and empirical gaps relating to these issues are identified, some of which are addressed in the other papers within this special issue.