Together with the evolution from the agro-industrial model to the sustainable rural development model (Roep and Wiskerke 2004), a part of the agro-food market has evolved from an anonymous, mass food market to a quality-food market. This shift is driven by factors, such as the changing relations...

This paper focuses upon the case of alternative food supply chains (AFSCs) as a "laboratory" for the implementation of sustainability concepts on a larger scale. To realize this type of upscaling, two important conditions should be fulfilled: the initiatives have to combine a performing internal...

Agriculture is faced by permanent evolution and it is expected that this trend will continue in the next decennium. The question is what challenges lie ahead and which types of agricultural research can support the sector in order to retain its competitive power by the year 2020. To address this...

This paper examines the factors influencing farmers' participation in several agri-environmental schemes. A multinominal logit model is used to separate between participating and nonparticipating farmers. In addition this model allows to predict farmers participation in one measure as well as in...

The agricultural policies shift gradually from EU-level organised market interventions to local organised environmental policies. This paper explores the growth possibilities of the Flemish dairy sector with the outlook of a quota abolishment as a case study of this policy shift. The dairy quota...

This paper analyze the problems of water resource allocation and crop choice in a river basin using spatial analytical tools. Spatial variability of water availability is modelled by the product sum model. Here the water availability at any farm Z(xj) is a joint spatio-temporal environment and...

An agricultural sector model for ex ante policy analysis is developed and applied for the simulation of alternative implementations of the Agenda 2000 Mid Term Review (MTR). The model uses an adapted version of Positive Mathematical Programming allowing simultaneous modelling of individual...

The central hypothesis of this paper is that there may be situations in which the traditional approach to institutional analysis is of limited applicability. Such an approach, which has been called 'comparative institutional analysis', consists of comparing institutional environments and...