Rural development policies and land use change : the Lombardy case study

Since the second half of last century the land use change has become one of the most important problem linked to territorial policies and governance. In all the Europe farms plays an important role against the increasing urbanization in the urban but also in the rural areas. The Rural Development Program (RDP) is one of the most important tools to support agriculture, as it must support farms through direct funding concerning competitiveness, sustainability, diversification. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the RDP measure for modernizing farms, their permanence on the territory and land consumption in a case study area, by the Propensity score matching technique. The analyse shows a link between agricultural land consumption and presence of the measure 121 of RDP.