A study by UCO's Department of Agricultural Economics, Finance and Accounting identifies stability and flexibility as the two components of farms' economic resilience and underscores the need for more targeted agricultural policies to ensure their effectiveness.
In the current scenario of climate change and economic instability, agricultural policies are increasingly focusing on improving the adaptive capacity and resilience of farms, and not only on promoting their sustainability. This capacity, known as resilience, is actually highly heterogeneous. Thus, if public policies are to be effective, they need to be more specific and focus on their two components: stability and flexibility.
This is the conclusion of a study carried out by the Department of Agricultural Economics, Finance and Accounting at the University of Cordoba and published in the journal Environmental and Sustainability Indicators.
Through a novel theoretical framework, the team formed by researchers Jaime Martín García, José A. Gómez Limón, and Antonio Menor Campos found that farms have two components of economic resilience that are, to a degree, opposites. Some farms are more stable over time and have difficulty adapting in the long term, while others find it easier to transform in the face of external disturbances, but are not as stable in the short term.
Given that, based on the two components of resilience identified, farms can respond to external changes in two ways, remain unchanged, or apply changes in the short term (for example, modifying the crop mix from one year to the next) or the long term (moving from rain-fed to irrigated or from conventional agriculture to organic), the key to better design public policies is for them to be more specific and take into account the wide variety of factors that, in a positive or negative way, influence the two components of farm resilience.
Thus, taking into account the circumstances of each sector and/or region, policies should be aimed at promoting farms' stability or focusing on further developing their flexibility.
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