In periurban areas agriculture can assume a multifunctional role that includes landscape conservation, sustainable resource management, biodiversity conservation, leisure activities, and can also maintain adequate conditions in densely populated areas for a safe and habitable environment. This...

The 2003 Common Agricultural Policy Reform aimed to promote the socio-economic and environmental sustainability of agricultural systems. An important question is how far the Reform has indeed encouraged farmers to contribute to achieving broad economic and environmental goals. The economic and...

This analysis has examined the relationships between the European funds for rural development and the multifunctionality during a short time, comparing two different situations before and after the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform. The main problem was to find a variable able to describe...

The New Member States did not yet have to implement the full cross-compliance package. Currently the GEAC requirements in the conditionality clause for the direct payments. The SMRs will become part of it starting from 2009. This paper looks into the Polish case and looks whether timely...

The decoupling of direct payments, caused by the introduction of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS), has generated an incentive for farmers to decrease the production of cereals, oilseeds and protein crops (COP) and (because of the reform of sugar CMO) sugar beet. In some cases, this has also...

In the so-called Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 'Health Check' the European Commission has recently proposed gradual transitional measures to allow a 'soft landing' of the milk sector to quota expiry. The aim of this paper is to support policy makers to get better insights in the implications...

The biological nature of agricultural production processes induce a higher degree of uncertainty surrounding the economic performance of farm enterprises. This has contributed to the development and acceptance of forms of public intervention aimed at reducing income variability that have no...

Paper removed at request of authors - 06/23/09.

Since 2000, the two important reforms of The EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) took place. The Agenda 2000 Berlin Agreement of March 1999 aimed to increase EU agriculture market orientation and focuses on the grain, oilseed, dairy and the beef sectors. It reduced intervention prices in these...

Agent-based models (AMB) allow to conceive social systems as the result of individually-acting agents. When they are applied to agriculture, they can simulate the fundamental behaviour at the micro-level of the individual farmers, without the need of aggregating them in “representative”...