Land-use conflicts and the Common Agricultural Policy: Evidence from Poland

The main goal of this paper is to show the implicit role of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in land-use conflicts at the regional level in Poland. With the use of the Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model we identified how CAP, through farmland price distortions, influenced the Polish land market in the years 2004–2013. The role of the policy in land-use conflicts depended not only on the size of the funds, but primarily on socio-economic conditions, farm structure, and the level of urbanisation of the regions where the conflicts of interests took place. We concluded that in the case of the least urbanised regions with small farms, CAP’s contribution to increases in farmland prices was very high and hence CAP implicitly hampered farmland turnover, thereby leading to economic conflicts between farmers. In the case of the most urbanised regions, CAP’s contribution to farmland prices was relatively low in comparison to other factors related to urbanisation processes. Hence, the farmers had high incentives to sell their land for non-agricultural purposes. Consequently, in those regions spatial conflicts arose from the fact that agricultural land was exposed to high conversion to non-agricultural purposes, something engendering conflict between farmers and non-farmers.