Assessing the Efficiency and Distribution of Agricultural Activities Using DSS

This work describes the sequential use of different Information Systems and Decision Support Systems (DSS) to measure the efficiency of a set of agricultural activities, and subsequently to propose alternative reallocations of these activities within a geographical region. The region selected as a case study was Ribatejo e Oeste (RO), an important agrarian region in mainland Portugal. The DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) methodology was used to assess the efficiency of the most important agricultural activities in RO, using the Frontier Analyst DSS to study alternative modelling options. In a second phase, plans for redistributing the evaluated activities were studied, aiming at promoting the most efficient activities (according to DEA) but without creating at the same time drastic changes in current land uses. Several plans constituting different compromises between these two objectives were found using a multiobjective linear programming DSS. A Geographical Information System was used to constrain the areas that were adequate for each type of crop and to graphically illustrate some proposed plans.