Towards a holistic approach to sustainable risk management in agriculture in the EU: a literature review

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the sectors most exposed to a plethora of risky phenomena such as weather, pests and diseases, changes in prices and government policies, instability of global markets. We review the literature on risk management (RM) in agriculture focusing on five key issues: i) why evidence on RM is often controversial; ii) how farmers behave in selecting among available RM instruments; iii) why some of these instruments are underutilised; iv) how to assess the impacts of innovative RM tools to (further) improve their design; v) how agricultural policy measures aimed at increasing the environmental sustainability of the sector could affect RM choices. We address all these issues to get a holistic vision of RM, and point at areas where further analyses are needed.