Report on resilience framework for EU agriculture

Abstract

Farming systems in Europe face a vast range of environmental, economic, social and institutional challenges. Examples include more volatile producer and input prices, higher probability of extreme weather events, increasing dependence on land owners and financial institutions, organizational change within value chains, competing policy objectives and increasing administrative demands, and new societal concerns and changing consumer preferences. In this paper we define resilience as maintaining the essential functions of EU farming systems in the face of increasingly complex and volatile economic, social, environmental and institutional challenges. A farming system is a system hierarchy level above the farm at which properties emerge as a result of the formal and informal interactions and interrelations among farms, available technologies, stakeholders along the value chain, citizens in rural and urban areas, consumers, policy makers, and the environment. Existing resilience frameworks do not sufficiently capture the regional interplay of the multiple processes and stakeholders apparent in farming systems. In order to capture the described developments in EU agriculture, and in order to proactively address those challenges, we propose a framework to analyse the resilience of EU farming systems. The integrated framework can be applied by public and private decision makers to formulate differentiated strategies across EU farming systems depending on context-specific challenges and available resources. ; EU; en; Contact: miranda.meuwissen@wur.nl