Greening as compensation to production of environmental public goods: how do common rules have an influence at local level? The case of durum wheat in Italy

The promotion of sustainability is envisaged by the new Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as a major issue for future policies in the agro-food sector, in line with the Europe 2020 Strategy. In this context, "greening" ecological payments have been conceived as a tool to encourage European farms towards the adoption of environmentally friendly practices. Since the new CAP became law, at least 30% of the national budget of direct payments is tied to the respect of three main ecological commitments by farmers managing 10 or more hectares of arable land, i.e. crop diversification, maintaining permanent grassland and maintaining the so called "ecological focus areas". The present research focuses on the possible effects of the greening instrument, by evaluating the impact of this tool in different Italian areas, specialized in the durum wheat cultivation. The objectives of the analysis are to evaluate the extent and features of the impact of greening in three case study areas and to discuss the likely implications in a policy-effectiveness perspective. Thus, an empirical analysis has been carried out in order to evaluate the impact of greening in three case study areas with a strong specialization in wheat production, located in the North, Centre and South of Italy.The results have been compared across the case studies and with other quantitative and qualitative studies carried out in different contexts. The results show that the impact of greening may be different even in areas with the same productive specialization. Namely, greening deeply impacts on the durum wheat cultivation area located in the South of Italy, while it seems to have a very marginal effect on the other two areas. Thus, greening has a strongly differentiated impact both at the farm and at the territorial level, at least for the Italian durum wheat production. Basing on these first results, the setting of specific solutions to rebalance the effects of greening on the durum wheat sector is envisaged, as allowed by the present regulatory framework, in order to avoid an over-diversification in the impacts of the greening measure among different Italian regions.