New approach to analyze relationships between agritouristic supply and territory

This paper defines the phenomenon of agritourism in Friuli Venezia Giulia (NE Italy) at the end of 2009, in the light of the multifunctionality of agritouristic farms and taking into account the land use. The proposed statistical approach to outline the situation includes (a) the classification of the variables linked to agritouristic supply to find the main supply types, (b) the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in order to classify the regional agritourisms according to their supply and (c) the Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) to investigate the relationships between agritouristic supply, agricultural land use and territory. Since the CCA is widely used only in social and environmental sciences, this work represents its first application in agribusiness field. The method becomes important during the agricultural policy planning processes because it provides decision makers with a means of rapid assessment of the relationships between rural supply and land uses on the territory.