Sustainable protected cultivation in a Mediterranean climate. Perspectives and challenges.

INTRODUCTION Over recent decades, Europe has been progressing from a “sustained agriculture” system to “sustainable agriculture”. The term “sustain”, from the Latin sustinere (sus-, from below and tenere, to hold), means “to keep in existence” or to maintain and implies long-term support and permanence. Sustainability is essentially seen as a criterion for guaranteeing development based on ecological and social balance: “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the current generation without undermining the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Hall, 2001). As it pertains to agriculture, sustainable describes farming systems that are able to maintain their productivity and usefulness to society indefinitely. These systems must be resourceconserving, socially supportive, commercially competitive and environmentally sound (Weil, 1990). In terms of the European Union agricultural policy, this concept has been translated into a move from a policy of subsidizing farmers based on their production to a policy of incentives for achieving environmental targets. Achieving sustainability generally implies a more efficient use of the available technology (Acutt at al., 1998). However, it should be pointed out that, since agricultural sustainability requires maximization of the net benefit to the society, the achievement of this objective must take all costs and deriving benefits (economic, social, environmental, etc.) into consideration (Bakkes at al., 2001). Recently, North Western European and Mediterranean protected cultivation systems have been described in terms of resource use, efficiency of the production process, environmental impact and related political and social-economic issues (Baudoin, 1999; Baille, 2001; La Malfa and Leonardi, 2001; Castilla, 2002). The differences that emerged enabled us to define a specific Mediterranean greenhouse agrosystem (Castilla et al., 2004). We will confine the following review on some aspects of resource use efficiency and sustainability in the greenhouse Mediterranean agrosystem.

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