Multiattribute evaluation of organic and inorganic agricultural food investments using fuzzy TOPSIS

Abstract

Since people well know the threats of inorganic agriculture to their health, they are more interested in organic agriculture than ever. Organic agriculture is expected to play a major role for a healthy world in the future whereas inorganic agriculture nowadays increases the volume of agricultural production and presents lower priced foods but causes health problems. The agricultural investments are generally evaluated by using linguistic terms since most of the evaluation criteria are intangible and inherently require imprecise data to be used. In this paper, we analyze six types of agricultural investment alternatives using eight different criteria based on linguistic data. One of the most-used multi-criteria decision-making methods, TOPSIS is used under fuzziness for the solution of this problem. A sensitivity analysis is also given to examine the robustness of the decision.

Keywords

• multiattribute
• organic food
• inorganic food
• investment
• fuzzy set
• TOPSIS