Assessment of Sustainable Production in rural areas

This paper presents a model for sustainable planning and optimization of agricultural production. The model is a mathematical programming model, based on multicriteria techniques, and is used as a tool for the analysis and simulation of agricultural production plans, as well as for the study of impacts of the various policies in agriculture. The model can achieve the optimum production plan of an agricultural region combining in one utility function different conflicting criteria as the maximization of gross margin and the minimization of fertilizers used, under a set of constraints for land, labour, available capital, common agricultural policy etc. The proposed model was applied to the region of Thessaly, in central Greece. In all prefectures, the optimum production plan achieves greater gross return, les fertilizers use, and less irrigated water use than the existent production plan