In general, the ultimate goal of a sustainable system is to maximize the benefits of existing resources and to minimize the threats to the environment that occur due to the present conventional agricultural activities. Meanwhile, seed, as a rice cultivar in the present study, is presented as an important factor in sustainability. Therefore, identifying the most suitable cultivar of rice for sustaining the rice cultivation system is considered to be the main goal of the research. The population of the present study involves all specialists who have enough knowledge on components of sustainability and rice cultivars. To this end, 16 people were identified and studied through non-probability sampling method (purposeful and snowball). Face and content validity was used to determine the validity of the questionnaire. In addition, to assess the reliability, inconsistency ratio was used. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) technique was used in order to achieve the main objective, which is to identify the most suitable varieties for sustainable rice cultivation system. Expert Choice 2000 software was applied to calculate the data.The prerequisite of applying AHP technique is to consider the criteria (sustainability of rice cultivation system) which include: economical, ecological, technical, social, and policy sustainability and their sub-criteria in the one hand, and decision alternatives (rice cultivars) including: Hashemi, Tarom, Neda, Fajr, Khazar and Shirudi in the other hand. The results of prioritizing the criteria of rice cultivation stability showed that the economical (32%), ecological (23.9%) and technical (21.1%) stability are more important than the stability of social (14.8%) and policy (8.3%) aspects. Likewise, research findings showed that the cultivars of Hashemi (20.6%) and Tarom (20.1%) with a slight difference against each other are the most proper cultivars, respectively, in the sustainability of rice cultivation system.

Keywords: Sustainable Agriculture, Rice, Analytical Hierarchy Process

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