Multicriteria decision support for the evaluation of agricultural units in Greece

Abstract

One of the main objectives of the common agricultural policy (CAP) is the increase of productivity of agricultural units. CAP is set and reformed in the frame of providing financial support to producers in primary sector via a single payment schema as a direct funding based on the land area, where farmers obtain ‘entitlements’. In Greece the total area is taken into account to the financial aid as form of direct payment. Therefore, the production is significantly decreased. In this paper the evaluation of agricultural units is proposed using the robust ordinal regression approach, and a case study dealing with the evaluation of Greek farmers in the industry of the juicing citrus is conducted. The method is used as an evaluation tool for financial aid to the farmers, towards the new policy, thus making the production-based approach more effective and objective. An additive evaluation model is proposed based on a consistent family of criteria composed by input and output criteria. The phenomenon of “Sofa Farmers” could be eliminated, since farmers would be financially aided after been evaluated. Finally, in order to obtain robust conclusions, post-optimality analyses are applied by computing complementary robustness measures.