The EU Agricultural Policy and the Environment. Evaluation of the Alpine Region
Topics
Policies and instruments
Abstract
Agriculture both creates pressures on the environment and plays an important role maintaining many cultural landscapes and semi-natural habitats. Unlike many other sectors, agriculture is one in which direct public intervention remains the norm rather than the exception. In fact, no other branch of the economy is so strongly regulated by economic policy measures. The book pursues the question, how the EU Agricultural Policy influences the landscape and the environment of the Alps. It represents the results and conclusions of the EU Framework IV Project, SUSTALP. The analysis is based on the assumption that the effect of agricultural policy on the environment can vary widely from region to region. From this perspective, the topological, cultural, social, and political diversity typical of the Alps represents an optimal framework for the analysis of the relationship between agrarian policy and the environment. The book is divided into 9 sections. Section 1 describes the research approach, based on the fact that the effects of the common agricultural policy on the environment are indirectly deducible through the operation strategies selected by the farmers. Section 2 analyses and compares the instruments of the EU Agricultural Policy and that of Switzerland, whereas section 3 highlight the coherence of the EU Agricultural Policy by means of a comprehensive objective analysis. Sections 4-6 are dedicated to the presentation of the empirical results. Based on a large quantity of data from all 5.558 Alpine municipalities, cluster analysis was used to identify eight agrarian structure types according to which the whole Alpine region was classified. An operational survey of 1.000 farmers was used to quantify the relationship between EU Agricultural Policy and environmental situation. In Section 7 the authors describe the relationship between operation strategies at the farm level and environmental issues in a conceptual way. Section 8 aims at quantifying the influence of agricultural policy on the environment by means of the empirical results. Finally, section 9 summarizes the results of the SUSTALP project with strategic relevance and formulates requirements addressed to politics in the sense of a sustainable development in the Alps.