Suchergebnisse

The existence of a "young farmer problem" in Europe has been recognized by scientists and policy-makers and is based on the widespread acknowledgement of the poor generational renewal rates in the farming sector and in particular in farmland management across the European Union. Despite existing support policy measures, young farmers (YF) face barriers which hamper the establishment and consolidation of their farming enterprises. Focusing on Alentejo (NUTS II), in Portugal, this paper identifies the difficulties YF face to accessing land, the high investment costs required to set up a farming unit, and the insufficient access to credit as the main reasons why young people are prevented from setting up their farming enterprises. Existing policy support measures targeting YF are widely perceived as inefficient with regard to triggering generational renewal. Hence, our findings suggest that not only is it necessary to pay greater attention to the complex question of land tenure, but that also the impact of policies implemented in the past should be examined in detail in order to develop and implement more effective measures that are sensitive to the different national and regional contexts ; This work was funded by the European Parliament grant IP/B/AGRI/IC/2017-021 "Research for Agri Committtee: Young Farmers Policy Implementation After the 2013 CAP Reform"; by the NEWBIE project "New Entrant netWork: Business Models for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Resilience in European Agriculture", grant 772835; and by National Funds through FCT (the Foundation for Science and Technology) under the project UID/AGR/00115/2019.

Transport investment is frequently advocated as having the double virtue of achieving both economic growth and territorial cohesion. The idea is that improving the accessibility of lagging regions to cities, increases the attractiveness of those regions for people and businesses. However, transport is only one of the factors affecting local development and there is no consensus on its net effect on population growth. The large scale of public funding allocated to motorway investment since the country joined the European Union in 1986 makes Portugal an ideal case study to examine the potential effect of improved road accessibility on the development of lagging rural areas. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between rural population change and road accessibility to the urban hierarchy (i.e. cities of different sizes) between 1991 and 2011. Regression analyses show that rural population growth is negatively associated with road distance and road travel time to the urban hierarchy, notably to medium-sized cities (i.e. 20,000-99,999 inhabitants). This suggests that medium-size cities play an important role in supporting population growth in their rural hinterlands. Robustness tests confirmed the validity of these findings. There is no evidence of nonlinearities in the magnitude of the effect between accessible and remote rural areas, which may be partially related to the relatively small size of the country. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Agroforestry landscapes are crucial to human wellbeing; however, they are in sharp decline across Europe. Improved understanding of the complexity of agroforestry landscapes within different biophysical, social-cultural, economic and governance contexts is essential for designing effective policy and management interventions that are more tightly aligned with societal expectations and aspirations. This paper identifies and compares values that people attribute to agroforestry landscapes across North-Eastern Europe, using case studies in Sweden, Latvia, Belarus, and the Russian Federation. We apply the multiple-value approach developed for the conceptual framework of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services to an assessment of agroforestry landscapes. Using data from a total of 1634 face-to-face structured interviews, we (i) analyse and explore the preferences of diverse groups of respondents for agroforestry landscapes; (ii) identify a broad range of nature's contributions to people (NCP) that were attributed to agroforestry landscapes by respondents; and, (iii) analyse values of agroforestry landscapes across different contexts in NorthEastern Europe. We found that a highly heterogenous group of people – broadly irrespective of age, education, gender, place of residence, as well as political, economic, or social-cultural context – perceive agroforestry landscapes to be important to their quality of life. Respondents attributed multiple NCP to agroforestry landscapes, and non-material NCP are the most frequently assigned in all four countries. An absolute majority of respondents across all case studies considered relational values of agroforestry landscapes to be important for their quality of life with identity as the most often associated with agroforestry landscapes. We discuss how relational values might be incorporated in policies and practices related to agroforestry landscapes in North-Eastern Europe. ; Special thanks to Mersha Gebrehiwot, Natalia Stryamets, Lena Shushkova, Austra Irbe and Liga Liepa for their great help in collecting the data in Sweden, Latvia, Belarus, and Russia. This long-term research was funded by the Swedish Research Council Formas (grant numbers 2019-01898 and 2017-01342), by the Swedish Institute (grant number 10976/2013), by the European Union and Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport in Czech Republic within the research project "Support for Development of the International Mobility of researchers at CZU in Prague" (n.CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/16_027/0008366), and by the Marie Curie (MSCA-ITN-ETN) EC -funded project "TERRANOVA - The European Landscape Learning Initiative" (grant agreement No 813904). This work was patially funded by National Funds through FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal) under the Project UIDB/05183/2020.