Abstract
Agriculture and farming worldwide are responsible for numerous environmental threats, including degradation of land and water resource depletion. Underlining the dynamic interaction between bio-physical and socio-economic drivers is the key towards a more sustainable land and water management. With regard to a highly-developed agricultural area in Southern Italy, multi-regression models were developed to provide an ex-post interpretation of the observed inter-annual variability of cropped land. The main drivers related to Common Agricultural Policy support, product market prices, crop yield, and irrigation water availability were investigated. The adopted models revealed the different weights of each driver. The findings reported the role that direct payments played in supporting the extension of irrigated crops, such as processing tomato. Likewise, the models pointed out the decoupled payment scheme as the most important driver of change in the crop pattern over the last years.
Highlights
Starting from the 1960s, there has been growth in both food production and the global population [1]
While, when subsidies are decoupled from production, the tomato area is related to a fixed subsidy without connection to crop yield (Figure 5b)
Bio-physical and socio-economic drivers were deeply analysed with regard to a wealthy agricultural area where both water-intensive tomato crops and rain-fed cereal crops underwent a substantial areal change
Summary
Starting from the 1960s, there has been growth in both food production and the global population [1]. As the global population will continue to grow in the coming decades, at the same time, food demand will increase while food producers are expected to experience greater competition for land, water, and energy [1]. Agriculture and farming are, in general, responsible for increasing environmental threats, including degradation of land and freshwater [2]. The technological innovations allowed a rapid increase in agricultural productivity [3] during the last fifty years. The world’s agricultural production grew about three times over this period, while the cultivated land grew 12%.
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