In the Southern rural Mediterranean, agriculture remains the main economic activity, in terms of employment and because agricultural exports remain an asset for most countries economy. Since the years 2000, lots of changes happened that shed light on increasing vulnerabilities in agriculture for the future in terms of food security and food prices instability on international markets, also regarding rural societies and especially the youth welfare and the natural environment degradation.

The region external dependency including to cereals and food have thus risen, weighing on public budgets, whereas previsions regarding climate change impacts shows deep disturbances for the future of the region with both socioeconomic and environmental impacts. Policies seeking to improve production and exports have led to favor private investors with large and technological farms; the agricultural policies seldom focus on small farming. Moreover, the adaptation capacities of agriculture and especially of small farmers in the region remain insufficiently known and valorized and therefore insufficiently taken into account by these public policies. Working conditions in the agricultural sector is characterized by a deficit of regulations, of insurance, of social recognition. This bad representation of agriculture as a sector of activity can be considered today as a main threat to a renewal of agriculture that could be led by Mediterranean rural societies. And in that situation, environmental concerns are not being endorsed by industrial farming nor by family farming or in a very marginal way. Environment is therefore a looser in these dynamics.