In Search of Strategies to Face the Economic Crisis: Evidence from Greek Farms

Abstract

This study examines the strategies – defensive or aggressive, individual or collective – undertaken by sheep farms in a Greek rural area in order to face the repercussions of the economic crisis and their effects on the productivity and economic performance of these farms. The article presents the results of a farm management survey conducted in 2010 and repeated in 2014 in northern Evros, Greece. The mix of strategies – mainly passive – adopted by farmers shows their confusion in the face of crisis conditions, which has resulted in reduced productivity, more use of family labour and a rise in collective actions.

Keywords:

• Greece
• resilience
• data envelopment analysis
• productivity analysis
• female family labour
• farm diversification
• livestock farming

Acknowledgments

This survey was conducted as part of the research project ‘The Multifunctional Role of Livestock Farms in the Muslim Minority Territory of northern Evros’. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial contribution of the Research Committee of the Alexander Technological Education Institute of Thessaloniki (grant number 80220). Special reference should also be made to the invaluable contribution of Dr Zaphiris Abas, who tragically died in a car accident.

Notes

1. The SFP was introduced with Regulation EC/1,782/2003 and was first implemented in Greece in 2005, replacing the previous subsidisation scheme, based on the acreage of crops or on the number of animals reared. According to the SFP scheme, farmers were eligible to receive a standard and predetermined amount each year (the average of the amount of subsidies that the farm received during the 2000–02 period) as income support, which would be decoupled from production.

2. The financial results calculated in this paper are defined as follows (Kitsopanidis 2006):

-	Gross output. The total value of all the products either sold in markets or consumed within the farm household. All income support payments are included in the gross output, except for the SFP.
-	Production expenses. These include land use costs (rent paid to land owners or the implicit rent of family-owned land), labour costs (wages paid or implicit wages of family members) and capital costs (variable capital including the value of purchased inputs and fixed capital annual expenses (buildings and machinery).
-	Net profit/loss. Gross output minus production expenses.
-	Gross profit. Gross output minus variable expenses.
-	Farm income. Rent (paid and implicit) plus wages (paid and implicit) plus capital interest minus net loss.

3. Recent applications of the method in the Greek sheep-farming sector include papers by Galanopoulos et al. (2011) and Theodoridis et al. (2012).