Resilience of extensive sheep farming systems in spain: strategies and policy assessment
- Autores: Daniele Bertolozzi Caredio
- Directores de la Tesis: Alberto Garrido Colmenero (dir. tes.), Isabel Bardaji Azcárate (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Ana Iglesias Picazo (presid.), Paloma Esteve Bengoechea (secret.), Belén Iráizoz Apezteguía (voc.), Dionisio Ortiz Miranda (voc.), Mauro Vigani (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Tecnología Agroambiental para una Agricultura Sostenible por la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: Archivo Digital UPM
- Resumen
European extensive sheep farming is undergoing several challenges and negative trends, which are threatening the capacity of sheep systems to generate income and provide public/private goods/services. This is particularly evident in the marginal and rural areas of southern EU, affected by gradual depopulation, abandonment, and transitions to more intensive and specialized sectors. Concerns over the survival of extensive sheep farming are basically due to the wide range of ecosystem services and socio-economic functions delivered by sheep systems, above all in those marginal areas where other productive activities are unfeasible. In order to find new solutions to overcome existing challenges, and anticipate the emerging ones, novel comprehensive and multidisciplinary approaches to assess the farming systems’ capacity to keep delivering their important functions are required. Within this broad scope, in recent years great importance has been attached to the resilience theory and its adaptations to agri-food systems. Most recent advances in resilience research in the EU have provided theoretical and analytical frameworks to assess the resilience of farming systems. Such approaches demonstrate remarkable potential, and worth being applied further.
The motivation of the PhD thesis is rooted into the urgent need to identify development trajectories and resilience paths that allow to conserve and boost the role played by extensive sheep farms in marginal areas of Spain, given the particular vulnerability of this sector. Sheep farms, in fact, are affected by several socio-economic, institutional and environmental challenges. Among the others, there is concern about the sharp reduction in lamb meat consumption, and the structural low profitability that is leading to transition to intensive productions, and the lack of workers and young successor willing to enter the sector. The main goal of the thesis, therefore, is to assess the strategies, management patterns, and policies that could potentially promote the capacity of extensive sheep farming systems to keep delivering their unreplaceable functions and services, in spite of the current and future challenges threatening the sector. To this end, the thesis research focuses on the case study of extensive sheep farms of Huesca, Aragón, Northeast Spain, with a minor incursion in the extensive beef farming of Sierra Guadarrama, Central Spain. In order to achieve the main goal, different aspects of extensive sheep farming system need to be investigated. These are addressed by five specific objectives: I) to identify the factors threatening intra-family farm succession and its characterizing phases; II) to identify the resilience attributes and capacities in alternative farm management patterns; III) to quantify the economic performance of alternative production strategies to cope with main economic risks; IV) to identify new ways through which risk management strategies may improve resilience; and V) to assess the impact of different policies on farms’ resilience, and to highlight potential developments in the policy framework.
The PhD thesis methodology draws upon the most recent advances in resilience research in Europe, with special regard to the assessment framework provided by the H2020 SURE-Farm project , within which this thesis was developed. The thesis is based on a comprehensive and multidisciplinary methodology including multiple sources of data, and qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis. The thesis investigation was carried out through four research studies, each targeting the first four research objectives, respectively. The fifth objective overarches the four studies. The first and the second research studies consist of a qualitative content analysis of 28 semi-structured interviews to farmers and their relatives. The third research study is based on an economic risk assessment including a farm profitability model and stochastic simulations, using national accountancy data and information from a survey of 60 farmers in Huesca. The fourth research study consists of a content analysis and coding of qualitative data from a focus group involving eight farming system’s stakeholders in Huesca.
The PhD thesis results show that intra-family farm succession follows three key steps: the potentiality of succession, the successor’s willingness to take over, and the effectiveness of succession. The willingness step was found to be the weakest step threatening the farm continuity in the sector, whereas the policy framework seems to be supporting almost exclusively the last step of effectiveness.
Along with the farm continuity, sheep farms in the region can follow four alternative development trajectories, namely extensification (more reliance on pasture-based), intensification (more stable-based), re-orientation (reduction of sheep and diversification), and conservation (farms’ structure maintenance based on quality production). All patterns promote adaptability to some extent, but the patterns extensification and conservation mainly contribute to robustness to reinforce the original farms’ structure, whereas the patterns re-orientation and intensification lead to transformations. There is clear distinction among resilience attributes determining transformative patterns like intensification and re-orientation, and those favouring the conservation or re-adjustment of traditional extensive management. The policy framework appears to drastically favour the transition towards more intensive or different productions.
Across the four farm trajectories, two main supply- and demand-oriented strategies seem promising: the increase of sheep prolificacy, and the use of protected geographical identification labels. The thesis findings highlight that feeding costs are the major source of risk, and that increased prolificacy has the greatest potential to mitigate this risk. In contrast, the quality labelling strategy shows scant performance, and appears to be more vulnerable to price variability.
The multi-stakeholder focus group indicated four main strategies to enhance resilience in the sector, i.e. 1) improving investment, financing capacity and insurance; 2) promoting lamb meat consumption (including bargaining power in value chain); 3) value extensive livestock contribution to environmental conservation and population retention; and 4) training and knowledge transfer. The stakeholders suggested manifold options to improve these strategies, which can be grouped into three main avenues: cooperation & marketing, the knowledge system, and the policy & financial tools.
This PhD thesis research provides a comprehensive and multifaceted analysis of the extensive sheep farming system dynamics in Huesca, and the different aspects that determine its resilience capacity, thus proving the efficacy of this resilience assessment approach. In addition, the thesis hints at ideas for future research in the case study area, mainly regarding the generational renewal and developments in the policy framework, as well as about the comparison with and generalization over other farming systems’ resilience assessments.
