Dr. George Vlontzos, Department of Agriculture, University of Thessaly, Greece.

Speech Title: Environmental assessment and prognostication--the case of agriculture

Abstract: One of the main goals of modern agriculture is the improvement of its environmental impact. Additionally, there is a need for the implementation of new efficiency assessment and prognostication tools for the evaluation of farming, because the influence of market forces has been increased substantially. In this paper, the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) Window methodology is used to assess Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions efficiency and identify efficiency change of EU countries' primary sectors, under the strong influence of Common Agricutlural Policy (CAP), quantifying by this way its positive or negative impact on a national basis, providing at the same time hints for counteractive actions. The main results provide the significant differences among EU countries, with the less developed ones to perform low environmental efficiency rates. Moreover, countries which their output depends to a large extend on arable crops achieve low efficiency rates too. Finally, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are being used as a tool to estimate future environmental performance of EU countries primary sectors, based on the GHG emissions indicator. The validation performance characteristics, as well as the linear fit to this output-target relationship, closely intersect the bottom-left and top-right corners of the plot. The combination of these methodologies provides a new methodological approach for environmental evaluation and prognostication, appropriately adjusted to the new challenges of agricultural production.