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Environmental and economic consequences of large-scale conversion to organic farming in Croatia

Znaor, Darko (2008) Environmental and economic consequences of large-scale conversion to organic farming in Croatia. PhD thesis, University of Essex, UK , Department of Biological Sciences. .

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Summary

Organic farming is a rapidly growing sector both in Croatia and elsewhere. However, there is some concern as to what a widespread adoption of organic farming would bring to society as a whole. The costs and benefits of this development and the associated trade-offs are largely unknown and have hardly been explored. There is a vast body of evidence showing that organic farming in most cases environmentally outperforms non-organic systems. However, organic farming is associated with lower yields and its further expansion might lead to job losses in some other sectors and potentially jeopardise the overall economic strength of a country.
This research presents an attempt to assess the environmental and economic consequences of the large-scale adoption of organic farming in Croatia in regard to national agricultural productivity, the labour force and environmental and economic performance. Besides farming the assessment has also taken into account the impact on farm-upstream linked sectors: energy, farm inputs manufacturing, trade, transport and research, education, advisory, veterinary and administrative services. In order to obtain the real value-added of these sectors, their gross value-added has been corrected for the associated environmental costs and public investments. The average annual results of the period 2001-05, representing the baseline, have been compared with fourteen development scenarios with different percentages of agricultural land under organic management, yields and premium prices.
All of the organic farming scenarios perform better environmentally than the baseline. The gross and real value-added of the scenarios examined depends on the area under organic management and the yields and premium price achieved. In the case of a total conversion and no premium, in order to ensure the same gross value-added, the average yields have to reach 96% of the baseline, or 85% for the same real value-added.


EPrint Type:Thesis
Thesis Type:PhD
Keywords:Large-scale conversion to organic farming; environmental impact assessment; economic performance of organic farming; external costs of agriculture; externalities; true cost accounting; external costs; macro-economic assessment; wide-spread adoption of organic farming; scaling of organic farming, Croatia;
Agrovoc keywords:
Language
Value
URI
English
UNSPECIFIED
UNSPECIFIED
Subjects: Farming Systems > Farm economics
Environmental aspects > Air and water emissions
Food systems > Policy environments and social economy
Environmental aspects
Research affiliation: Croatia
UK > Univ. Essex
Deposited By: Znaor, Dr Darko
ID Code:26381
Deposited On:23 Jun 2014 10:31
Last Modified:23 Jun 2014 10:31
Document Language:English
Status:Published
Refereed:Peer-reviewed and accepted

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