Tobacco decoupling impacts on income, employment and environment in European tobacco regions

This paper presents a multicriteria mathematical programming model that was developed to study the impacts of different tobacco diversification alternatives on income, employment and environment. The model estimates the farmers' utility function taking in account various conflicting criteria that can explain the farmers' behaviour (e.g., maximisation of farm income, risk minimisation, labour, etc.). The model is used to simulate alternative tobacco decoupling scenarios to take alternative farm plans that achieve different levels of income, labour and environmental impacts. Different tobacco alternatives have been used for this purpose resulting from field research in four of the European tobacco regions, two in Greece and two in Spain. The results have shown differences in all case studies in Greece and Spain due to the impacts of tobacco decoupling and in spite of its positive effect on the environment, the loss in farmers' income and mainly the increase of unemployment in the tobacco regions of Greece and Spain will be very important in short and medium terms as it is obvious that these matters will cause significant problems in the local rural economies.