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Abstract
Agent-based models (AMB) allow to conceive social systems as the result
of individually-acting agents. When they are applied to agriculture, they can
simulate the fundamental behaviour at the micro-level of the individual farmers,
without the need of aggregating them in “representative” agents. RegMAS
(Regional Multi Agent Simulator) is an open-source spatially explicit multi-agent
model framework specifically designed for long-term simulations of effects of
policies on agricultural systems. Using iterated conventional optimisation
problems as agents' behavioural rules, it allows for a bidirectional integration
between geophysical and social models where spatially distributed characteristics
are taken into account in the linear programming problem of the optimising
agents as individual resources. The model is applied to asses the impact of the
Health Check, the imminent further Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform, on
farms structures, incomes and land use in a hilly area of a central Italian region
(Marche). Our results suggest that the Health Check, while increasing the farmer
profit net of CAP support, is substantially neutral on the overall farmer incomes,
also through a reduction of the off-farm labour. Neverless, a limited negative
effects may arise in the farms numerousness, with the consequence of a land
abandonment that is noticeable only on mountain areas, where distances
between farmers are greater.