Greek economic crisis and new agrarian dynamics: The example of Eastern Thessaly [Crise économique grecque et nouvelles dynamiques agraires: L’exemple de la Thessalie orientale]

Abstract

Eastern Thessaly is a plain bordered by semi-mountainous landscape. The region is home to dairy sheep and goat farming systems exploiting both public and private agro-pastoral resources. The effect of decoupled payments, decreasing prices for irrigated cotton and groundwater depletion bring back complementarities between semi-mountainous breeding systems and plain-located productions (fodder crops). In parallel, the high unemployment rate and the decreasing incomes caused by Greek crisis are leading to conversion of activity in dairy sheep and goat farming, based on communal rangeland grazing. This farming activity is often characterized by a semi-subsistence economy with low cost, fully or partially exploring common spaces. Those two evolutions are promising because their combination in the same agrarian system could lead to complementarities in spatial management in favor of the development of small-ruminant farming systems. However, they face many limits to their development: current irrigated cropping systems are highly dependent on historically based decoupled payments, which represent more than 65% of their farming income. On the contrary, reconversion breeding systems based on rangeland utilization suffer from scant support from European subsidies, and yield low reproductive and productive parameters due to a lack of production means and technical information. Uncertain orientations of the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and economic situation in Greece will not allow the current farm income support to be maintained, nor the support for rural development. We must therefore guide agricultural development towards decreasing production costs and enhancing product value, through farming practices adapted to local fodder crops and development of local production networks. This article aims at showing how economic crisis and long-term European subsidies have shaped the agrarian system of Eastern Thessaly, and seeks to identify specific needs of regional dairy sheep breeding systems. © Armand Colin.