ABSTRACT
Agriculture remains a significant production and employment sector in southern European countries. Mediterranean crops show significant seasonality and are highly dependent on migrant workers. Southern European agriculture is not a homogeneous sector: on the contrary, it is highly diversified and unevenly developed within each country. Despite the stereotypical view of Mediterranean agriculture as a mosaic of small- to medium-scale family farms producing globally recognized quality food products, there exists a range of agricultural systems that vary from highly intensive vegetable production to extensive cereal farms (Moragues-Faus et al., 2013). More important, the modernization of agriculture and the rise of ‘agricultural productivism’ have been major trends in many southern European countries. According to available EU data, the number of farm holdings is declining with a subsequent rise in the average size of holdings, the size of family labour is shrinking while the share of non-family wage labour is increasing, and commercial crops and stockbreeding are expanding at the expense of extensive cultivations (Eurostat, 2014). These trends comply with the wider aims of the Common Agricultural Policy, which is regularly reformed in an attempt to modernize agriculture and make it more market-oriented (Giannakis and Bruggeman, 2015; Papadopoulos, 2015).
