“…In Europe, agricultural intensification, technological developments and the influence of the Common Agricultural Policy increased productivity until the early 1990s; farming was focused on the most fertile and accessible land, while the more marginal regions were left aside (MacDonald et al, 2000;García-Ruiz and Lana-Renault, 2011). This process has been observed in Portugal (Nunes et al, (Fernández-Ales et al, 1992;Lasanta et al, 2005;García-Ruiz, 2010), France (Sluiter and de Jong, 2007), Italy (Giupponi et al, 2006) and Greece (Marathianou et al, 2000). In China and Eastern Asia, Fu et al (2006) and Rao and Pant (2001) assessed changes in the landscape and land use in relation to agricultural practices and wider socioeconomic changes that put terrace farming at an economic disadvantage.…”