European Union agricultural policy scenarios' impacts on social sustainability of agricultural holdings

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the impacts of household behaviour on social sustainability by simulating agricultural policy scenarios of the European Union (EU) Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). For this purpose a multicriteria model was formulated, at farm household level, in order to study the social impacts of the CAPs using different scenarios. The scenarios were chosen on the basis of the main EU policies affecting farm households, such as the alternative crops scenario, the Water Framework Directive scenario and the agrienvironmental schemes scenario. The data for this analysis resulted from the CAP-IRE project, a European FP7-funded project. The model includes a utility function with several conflicting criteria such as maximization of gross margin and risk and labour minimization. The model is further used to simulate the impacts on social sustainability by estimating main social indicators. The model is applied in two different farm types in Greece. The results show that the CAP scenarios have multiple social impacts on agricultural holdings, and particularly on the farm labour structure. These impacts have negative effect on social sustainability.

Keywords:

• impact assessment
• social sustainability
• multicriteria analysis
• scenario analysis
• common agricultural policy

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper was funded by the EU within the project CAP-IRE (7th Framework Program) ‘Assessing the multiple impacts of the common agricultural policies on rural economies’. Further information is available on the following website: http://www.cap-ire.eu. This document does not represent the point of view of the European Commission.