Current thoughts on CAP changes, e.g. the "Health Check", emphasize the necessity to move away from payments based on historical receipts towards a "flatter rate" system. The aim of current research is to simulate the impact of a flat rate system (equal payments per hectare of cultivated land)...

To explain over- and underuse of available quota, Buysse et al. (2007) have integrated the shadow cost of the quota constraint in a quota flexibility function in a positive mathematical programming model. This method and central hypothesis, formulated and tested for the case of Belgian sugar...

In 2005, 30% of the Flemish farms faced a manure excess, while at aggregated level still 9.7% of the emission rights were unused. This means that, despite the various possibilities, Flemish farmers do not succeed in an effective exchange of manure between farms. In current paper is shown how...

One of the common strategies in rural development programmes is to support the adoption of new on-farm activities. The rationale behind this is that farm diversification is a way to assure an appropriate level of income for the farmers. Through interviews with 49 relatively small farmers, the...

There is a high potential for simultaneously increasing sustainability of the earth system and economic development by removing inefficiencies currently present both at the production input and output side. In this paper a static view on sustainability is employed, by introducing capacity...

Regional development is receiving a lot of attention nowadays in European policy. A possible stepping stone to achieve regional development is regional identity. This paper investigates whether regional identity can contribute to the specific case of agricultural regional development. One...

Farmers in peri-urban regions face many problems, among which land scarcity is a major one according to literature. However, as indicated by a survey among farmers in the peri-urban region around Brussels, land scarcity is not perceived as a problem by all farmers to the same extent. Based on...

A farm model is developed for simulating the potential income change resulting from conversion to organic farming. The model uses conventional farm data, taken from the Belgian FADN. Given the normative character of the model, and the impossibility of calibration to historical conversion...