No abstract

No abstract

This paper discusses research aiming at assessing Common Agricultural Policy impacts on agriculture and forestry. For this purpose an approach is developed that includes a linear programming model to estimate the Positive Mathematical Programming production cost function coefficients of current agriculturalforestry activities. It further includes a heuristic -simulated annealing -to generate solutions for each policy scenario. This model base approach is integrated within a decision support system (DSS) for testing purposes. The DSS further encompasses a relational database that stores agricultural-forestry technical and economic data and a geographic information system that stores topological data of regional farm-type land units. The DSS Graphical User Interface provides tabular and geographical reporting capabilities. Results are discussed for an application to the Alentejo region in Southern Portugal. Results demonstrate the usefulness and relevance of the proposed approach to assess the impact of changes in prices and in agricultural policy on land use patterns and on forestry.

The management of forests in the Mediterranean basin is a complex problem, for which many political solutions have been used. In Portugal, these solutions tried to overcome the small property dimension, the elderly and/or absent owners and their relation with new functions and new approaches of forestry areas linked with changes on Common Agricultural Policy and the agriculture development paradigm. The solution must take into account the valorization of all economic activities that exist in the forest, but also the fire risk decreasing and the biodiversity preservation. This paper proposes a model that allows designing several economic scenarios, producing biodiversity and fire risk indicators, but also achieving the best compromise solution between these issues using compromise programming. The model was applied in a Forest Intervention Zone Arade-Alte/S. B. Messines, in the South of Portugal. The results show that the model is able to provide important information by creating a complete management plan and simulating the best compromise solution among fire risk, economic result and the biodiversity indicator, providing an added background for the analysts.

No abstract

The main purpose of this paper aims to know the farmer's attitudes towards the agricultural production, the political support, and the irrigation project of Alqueva in the context of the 2003 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) Reform, the Health-Check, in a micro-region located near the Mediterranean Sea. For this purpose, we use the Theory of Planned Behaviour. The main results suggest that the majority of farmers are a relatively homogeneous cluster about their attitudes but not in their behavioural intentions. These farmers still maintain a productivist mindset, wish to maintain an agricultural focus and strongly reject the notions of policy liberalisation. The main conclusions suggest that although the farmers have a great potential of innovating the future CAP policies, the water supply irrigation price and the conditions of access to agricultural credit, may compromise their innovation capacity in the future, in particular on the smaller farms.

No question remains regarding our need to change toward sustainable agriculture. When ranking the industries that have more prevalent environmental impacts, agriculture holds a considerable share of responsibility. However, as sustainability is an ambiguous concept surrounded by controversy and debate, rather than attempt to describe its meaning through a single universal definition, we instead stressed the need to delineate a set of fundamental principles. With the goal of putting the sustainable-agriculture concept into practice, an inductive qualitative content analysis was employed based on multivariate methods on hundreds of different definitions, theories, notions and sustainability indicators gathered through a deep-structured literature review. Through this novel approach, we were able to identify four fundamental principles for sustainable agriculture (integrated management, dynamic balance, regenerative design, and social development), and concluded that in order to shift our current agricultural systems into more efficient and sustainable ones, we need to start making better use of natural and human resources. This work provides guidelines for reference that can be used by anyone whenever they make a decision regarding sustainable agriculture or apply a methodology to assess a particular behavior, process or situation.

No abstract