Spatial Patterns of Agricultural Development: Application of the Composite Index Approach (A Case Study of Fars Province)

The interest for the spatial dimensions of agricultural development has been recently increased. This paper aimed at redefining the spatial patterns of agriculture to formulate appropriate strategies based on regional potentials. A Composite Agricultural Development Indicator (CADI), which is useful for the identification of spatial structure, has been developed. The developed composite Index (CI) includes five dimensions of Agricultural Development: (1) social-cultural, (2) structural-farming, (3) technical-management, (4) economical-financial, and (5) infrastructural-services and consists of 87 indicators selected at the county level. Indicators were normalized according to a coherent framework and using the division by means technique and were combined via weightings derived from Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and Principal Components Analysis (PCA). The evaluation of agricultural development based on desired CADI was used to map the spatial development patterns at county level. Province counties are compared and ranked in order to show the spatial gap between them. Then, spatial development patterns were divided into three zones based on CADI. Results showed that the nature of spatial agricultural development firstly depends on the service and infrastructural development and secondly on utilization of natural and physical endowments.