The evolution of agricultural GHG emissions in Italy and the role of the CAP A farm-level assessment

This paper firstly proposes a methodology to reconstruct the agricultural GHG emissions and the consequent Carbon Footprint (CF) at the farm level. This allows investigating how the emission performance of Italian farms evolves over time, distinguishing among typologies of farms and territories. Secondly, the paper attempts to put forward some hypotheses explaining the observed heterogeneous evolution of the farm-level CF. In particular, the attention focuses on the possible role of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The empirical analysis concerns a balanced panel of Italian FADN (Farm Accountancy Data Network) farms observed over years 2003-2007. Results, although interesting and encouraging, deliver unclear and ambiguous evidence on the role of the CAP on the observed CF performance and evolution. Several improvements seem needed to achieve more conclusive evidence to make this assessment more sound and robust, in order to inform the debate and the decisions about the proper policies to mitigate agricultural GHG emission