Analysis the Sustainability of Macro and Sectorial Agricultural Policies in Five-year Plans of the Islamic Republic of Iran

Making appropriate sustainable –oriented policies to achieve sustainable agriculture is very important. So, the agricultural unsustainability in Iran may be caused by limited attention to the principals of sustainability in agricultural development policy making. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to analyze the sustainability of macro and sectorial agricultural policies of Islamic Republic of Iran. Content analysis research method was used for analyzing the policies. Hierarchical Additive Weighting method (HAW) of decision making models and Shannon entropy weighting method were used to prioritize the five-year development plan. The results show that the national macro policies including constitutional law, Iran outlook 1404 and its policies and the policies of five-year development plan have moved toward sustainability in thought. Sustainable development concept has been introduced from Iran’s second development plan. In terms of the sustainability orientation of development plans, the fifth plan is in first priority and then there are forth, second, third and first plan. Thus the trend has been almost growing, Based on the calculated weights, the importance of various dimension of sustainability has been not the same and in comparison with economic and social dimensions, the environmental dimension has been less important. So the sustainability has not been accepted as an agricultural development paradigm.