A Computational Approach to Sustainable Policies Evaluation of the Italian Wheat Production System

This work outlines the modeling steps for developing a tool aimed at supporting policymakers in guiding policies toward more sustainable wheat production. In the agricultural sector,policies affect a highly diverse set of farms, which differ across several dimensions such as size,land composition, local climate, and irrigation availability. To address this significant heterogeneity, we construct an Agent-Based Model (ABM). The model is initialized using a representative survey of Italian farms, which captures their heterogeneity. The ABM is then scaled to include a number of farms comparable to those operating nationwide. To capture broader dynamics, the ABM is integrated with two additional components:a global model of international wheat markets and a tool for assessing the environmental impacts of wheat production. This integrated framework enables us to account for the feedback loop between global prices and local production while evaluating the environmental implications of policy measures.