Determination of Effective Policies for Ecological Agriculture Development with System Dynamics and Agent Based Models – Case Study in Slovenia - Efficient Decision Support Systems: Practice and Challenges from Current to Future - page 357

This paper presents a system dynamics model for development of organic agriculture in
Slovenia in order to identify key reasons and propose development policy to achieve strategic
goals set in the ANEK (Majcen and Jurcan, 2006). The paper is organized as follows: first we
present the state of the art of organic agriculture with its system analysis and identify key
variables, main flows and feedback loops in the systems. The results section presents scenarios
(different policies in organic farming) and their evaluation using the developed SD model.
Main findings and suggestions for further study conclude this article.
2. Model development
2.1 Study area
We selected the Republic Slovenia as study area in order to develop and employ the SD
model. The most of Slovenia agriculture is located (with exception of eastern flat land with
its intensive field crop production) in hilly unfavorable areas. In the European space
Slovenia belongs to the countries with the most unfavorable conditions because of its
diverse and mountainous relief and high proportion of carst areas. Recent studies have also
shown deficiencies of organic products on the market (Pažek at al., 2006). Thus organic
agriculture has been identified as one of developmental opportunities.
There are approximately 80,000 farms in Slovenia; conventional and organic. In year 2006
only 1,728 farms are in the organic farm control system. Even though the subsidy has been
offered (Recent research has shown (Rozman et al., 2007) that correlation between subsidies
level and number of organic is too low) to the farmers, the proportion of the organic farms is
still low, not higher than 5%. The short term strategic goal is to reach the 10% or 15% ratio
by the year 2015. This is determined by the state action plan ANEK (Majcen and Jurcan,
2006). Although the number has increased to 2000 in 2007 and 2067 in 2008 the strategic goal
(15%) is still underachieved.
In Slovenia up to 440,349 hectares are defined as less favoured areas (LFA). These are hilly
and mountainous areas, areas with karst features or other factors that limit possibilities of
intensive farming. Relatively high share of less favourable areas make Slovenia suitable for
less intensive sustainable production systems - such as organic agriculture.
The system analysis of organic agriculture
In order to provide the proper systemic solution of the described problem, the simulation
model should be build which represents the structure with key elements. The simulation
model should consider the key variables that influence the development of the organic
farming such as:
- number of conventional farms
- number of organic farms
- conversion
- subsidies
- promotion of organic farming (marketing, market development, education
- organization of general organic farming support environment
- system self awareness
- delay constants of process changes
The key variable in the model is the number of organic farms. These are the farms that are in
the control system at the one of the control organizations. The growth of the number of
organic farms was initially (in year 1998) almost linear however, in the years from 2003-2005
the growth is moderated to approximately 4% despite the increase of subsidies for 20%-30%.