Towards a holistic approach to sustainable risk management in agriculture in the EU: a literature review

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the most concerned sectors, due to its exposure, to a plethora of risky phenomena such as weather, pests and diseases, changes in prices and government policies, instability of global markets. We review the literature on risk management in agriculture focusing on four key topics: i) why evidence on RM is often controversial; ii) how farmers behave in selecting among available RM instruments; iii) why some of these instruments are underutilised; iv) how to assess the impacts of innovative RM tools in order to (further) improve their design. These questions are answered transversally, and emphasis is posed on areas where further analyses are needed.

Keywords

• use of chemicals and irrigation, behavioural factors, adoption of risk management tools, risk management choices, feasibility studies