Existing studies have employed discourse analysis to examine the reform of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) but have only partially studied the implementation of the discourse in the context of CAP measures and budgetary distribution. The present study tries to fill this gap. By conducting a discourse analysis of the latest CAP reform (2014–2020) documents, we attempted to determine which discourses and discourse strategies predominated in the reform’s documentation and how they were implemented into measures and budgetary distributions. The findings show that in the process of CAP reform decision-making, European institutions justified the CAP with a transformation of key discourses (productivist, multi-functional and neo-liberal) by emphasising the hugely popular environmental element while, at the same time, employing a strong productivist discourse at the level of measures and the budgetary distribution between the EU member states and farmers’ groups. In order to retain a strong CAP as well as the current distribution of financial resources, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council employed greening as a justification strategy as well as a productivist discourse as a major component in determining CAP measures.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3498376
Within a life cycle assessment (LCA), normalization is an essential part for interpretation. In Europe, only the European Union normalization factors (EU NFs), with 2000 as the reference year, are available for LCA practitioners, although they work on a regional level. The hypothesis of this research was based on the assumption that some regional NFs deviate from the EU NFs due to unique regional profiles, or because of previously omitted or generalized human impact. In this particular case study set in Slovenia has been tested. By working on the ReCiPe 1.08 life cycle impact assessment methodology, 18 impact categories were investigated, and an additional 3 were added: electromagnetic radiation, light pollution and electric use. To meet practitioners’ needs, the most upto-date inventory data was used with the reference years of 2007–2012. Out of 440 environmental interventions that were investigated, 139 had no characterization factors (CFs), 97 were estimated using machine learning and 42 had to be omitted. The final result confirmed our hypothesis. Twenty NFs were compared with the EU NFs, and the results have shown that on average, the NFs differ by a factor of 9.76 (median = 1.65). The reasons for the high deviation are due to natural land transformation, and ionising radiation, toxicological and ecotoxicological impact categories; where there are major data gaps in the CFs. The primary concern of the research was data availability for toxicological and ecotoxicological parameters for toxicity-related emissions, and the fact that original CFs covered only 50.25% of plant protection products used in Slovenia. Toxicological and ecotoxicological uncertainties were illustrated by comparing four different results. Future studies should be focused on the use of machine learning to provide the next generation of CFs and to go beyond the CFs’ damage-oriented assessment. Remediation should be the new endpoint category and its units should be Joules.
COBISS.SI-ID: 8061305
Farm tourism is a significant means of supplementing farmer's incomes. This paper presents a methodology for ranking tourist farms by using a multi-criteria model based on the qualitative multi-criteria modeling methodology, DEX, to assess service quality. The software tool DEXi was used to achieve this end. The model was then applied to seven tourist farms with data derived from questionnaires completed by tourist farm operators and guests. The results are shown as service quality assessments for individual farms. The potential of the model for assessing the farms is demonstrated with the aim of providing a comprehensive explantation and justification of the assessment technique. It also indicates potential improvements that farms can make through "what-if" analysis and visualisation. Despite limitations, such as use of qualitative data only, the approach is proposed as being both appropriate and advantageous when compared with other means of ranking enterprises.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2713900
Agriculture is a complex system in which the economic principles of production are directly intertwined with its biological and ecological characteristics. The paper investigates synergetic potentials of multiplecriteria and multipleperspective evaluation of agricultural activity through a study of the dairy sector in S lovenia. Socioeconomic and emergy evaluation was performed on nine farm types, formulated to represent the diversity of the country's dairy sector. The results indicate larger discrepancies in the performance of the farm types when defined by socioeconomic or emergy based indicators. Standard socioeconomic evaluation favours larger conventional systems that are cost efficient and financially independent. Emergy analysis however, favours less productive organic farms, which show greater ability to exploit free local resources and produce less stress on the local environment. socioeconomic and emergy indicators show that small conventional farm types are the poorest performers overall. Analysis of emergy flows reveals for all farm types a high dependency on the wider socioeconomic system, suggesting that within the current economic system agriculture itself has little ability to affect its sustainability. The paper suggests a complementarity in the evaluation approaches. Their joint application can improve the quality of the decisionmaking process in various stages of planning in agriculture and land use.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3440008
This paper is a combination of political economy and critical discourse analysis of public texts about the common agricultural policy (CAP) by concerned agents and the EU’s agricultural Commissioner in the period of November, 2004 until October, 2007. The analysis reveals how concerned agents articulated three competing discourses (neomercantilism, multifunctionality, and neoliberalism). It also shows that elements of the discourse of neoliberalism in the Commissioner’s speeches, despite her use of different discourses for different audiences, are becoming more and more important in order to facilitate further reforms and liberalisation of the CAP.
COBISS.SI-ID: 2397320
Longterm experimental hop breeding data in Slovenia were used to create a model of an expert system. The model based on the multiattribute decision modeling methodology DEX. The DEXHOP 1.0 model assessed and ranked individual hop hybrids’ and hop varieties’ breeding potential to be assessed and ranked. The model has 18 attributes, hierarchically grouped within four main attributes: Biology, Chemistry, Morphology and Brewing value. Furthermore, utility functions in the model were defined by sets of elementary decision rules throughout the entire hierarchy for all aggregated attributes. The central part of the model contains 144 decision rules. This article contains also a comparative analysis of the market quality parameters for the of different hop hybrids – compared with established foreign hop varieties.
COBISS.SI-ID: 534412
This article analyses the interactions between agricultural policy measures in the EU and the factors affecting GHG emissions from agriculture on the one hand, and the adaptation of agriculture to climate change on the other. To this end, the article uses Slovenia as a case study, assessing the extent to which Slovenian agricultural policy is responding to the challenges of climate change. All agricultural policy measures related to the 2007–2013 programming period were analysed according to a new methodological approach that is based on a qualitative (expert evaluation) and a quantitative (budgetary transfers validation) assessment. A panel of experts reached consensus on the key factors through which individual measures affect climate change, in which direction and how significantly. Data on budgetary funds for each measure were used as weights to assess their relative importance. The results show that there are not many measures in (Slovenian) agricultural policy that are directly aimed at reducing GHG emissions from agriculture or at adaptation to climate change. Nevertheless, most affect climate change, and their impact is far from negligible. Current measures have both positive and negative impacts, but overall the positive impacts prevail. Measures that involve many beneficiaries and more budgetary funds had the strongest impact on aggregate assessments. In light of climate change, agricultural policy should pay more attention to measures that are aimed at raising the efficiency of animal production, as it is the principal source of GHG emissions from agriculture.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3836552
The goal of this study is to assess residents' preferences for a set of attributes describing the recreation setting in an urban forest (outstanding trees, forest openings, waymarks and information boards, and paved walking trails) and to explore the heterogeneity of those preferences. It was captured by a four-class latent class model used to segment a sample of residents of Ljubljana (the capital of Slovenia), who responded to a choice experiment-based poll. The survey focused on the Rožnik urban forest, for which preferences (also willingness-to-pay) for hypothetical changes in the attributes were assessed. Respondents in class 1 were invariant to changes in the recreation setting. Those in class 2 and 4 stated positive preferences for having more outstanding trees. Class 3 and 4 were in favour of increasing the area of forest openings and enhancing the maintenance of waymarks and information boards. Those in class 4 expressed positive preferences for more walking trails, whereas class 3 valued this negatively. Class membership was affected by respondent age, number of adults in the household, frequency of forest visits, income, and purpose of the visit.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4203174
To cope with data limitations and to provide insight into the dynamics of LUCC for local stakeholders in the Municipality of Koper, Slovenia, we constructed an ABM (loosely defined) that integrates utility theory, logistic regression, and cellular automatonlike rules to represent the decisionmaking strategies of different agents. The model is used to evaluate the impact of LUCC on human wellbeing, as represented by the provision of highly productive agricultural soil, the extent of noise pollution, and qualityoflife measurements. Results for the Municipality of Koper show that, under a range of model assumptions, (1) high quality agricultural soils are disproportionately affected by urban growth, (2) aggregate resident quality of life increases nonlinearly with a change in development density, (3) some drivers of residential settlement produce nonlinear preference responses, and (4) clustering industrial development had a beneficial impact on human wellbeing. Additional novel contributions include the incorporation of noise pollution feedbacks and an approach to empirically inform agent preferences using a conjoint analysis of social survey data.
COBISS.SI-ID: 7000185
The effect of major weather factors on the quality of hops in Slovenia from 1994 to 2009 is analyzed and discussed. For this purpose, the three domestic main varieties, namely Savinjski golding, Aurora and Bobek were merged into a model variety which we called Virtual. Through assessment of correlation coefficients, we tried to find specific times of the year when the weather conditions significantly affect the alphaacid content with a view toward prediction. The most significant time periods of weather that influenced the alphaacid contents of hops during the growing season are identified as attributes of air temperatures calculated during the interval from the 24th to the 31st week (T2431; r = –0.92; P ( 0.01), as attributes of rainfall and sunshine duration calculated during the interval from the 25th to the 29th week (R2529; r = 0.83; P ( 0.01 and S2529, r = –0.76; P ( 0.01), and as attributes of air humidity calculated during the interval from the 28th to the 33rd week (RH2833; r = 0.77; P ( 0.01).
COBISS.SI-ID: 3511852