Few studies have been conducted to assess agricultural sustainability in the European Union (EU), and all of them fail to provide a holistic view of sustainability in a relevant temporal horizon that ...could effectively support the design of policies. In this paper, a composite indicator is constructed based on the geometric aggregation of 12 basic indicators measured yearly in the period 2004–2020 (17 years) on all EU countries plus United Kingdom, with weights determined endogenously according to the Benefit of Doubt (BoD) approach. Our composite indicator has a two-level hierarchical structure accounting for the contributions of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. In our results, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania and Poland are the countries with the strongest growth rate of sustainability, while countries reaching the 90th percentile of the score in sustainability include Austria, Czechia, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Sweden. In overall, the social and the environmental dimensions have similar levels, while the level of the economic dimension is definitely higher. Interestingly, several countries with a high level of sustainability are characterized by a decline of the economic dimension, including Austria, Finland, Italy, Latvia and Slovakia. The reliability of our composite indicator is supported by the substantial agreement of sustainability scores with subsidies attributed by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Therefore, our proposal represents a valuable resource not only to monitor the progress of EU member countries towards sustainability objectives, but also to refine the scheme for the attribution of CAP subsidies in order to stimulate specific sustainable dimensions.
The number of young farmers has decreased over recent decades in several developed countries such as the United States and European countries. A recent strategy adopted by the European Union to ...address the resulting age imbalance is the Young Farmer Payment which provides an additional payment on top of the average basic payment introduced in the last Common Agricultural Policy reform. The objective of this study is to determine, by means of a behavioural approach, how this payment influenced the incentives of young farmers to stay in the farm. Using the endogenous succession cycle model and the structural modelling technique, we found that the payment affected young farmers’ willingness to stay through its influence on non-economic motivational goals. However, we also found that there are other factors that can be even more influential, such as pessimism about farming, community and family integration, participation in decision making, and the opinion of neighbours, among others. Based on the results, we argue that similar policies could be adopted in other countries, although policies would be more effective in addressing age imbalances if they are accompanied with complementary strategies aimed to deal with the identified social and psychological considerations.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
•Estimating the impact of CAP on farms’ endogenous factor-augmenting technical change using CES production function.•Using farm-level data, we found a slow decline in factor- augmenting technical ...change in the EU the agricultural sector.•Nominal amount of decoupled, investment, and LFA subsidies have positive impact on technical change.•The larger the share of subsides in total income, the stronger the negative impact on agricultural productivity.•New CAP reform should invest in agricultural innovations to improve productivity using environmentally sustainable practices.
This paper adopts an alternative method for the analysis of the CAP’s impact on farms’ productivity based on a system of equations derived from a non-nested three-factors CES production function. With this method, we estimate the elasticity of substitution between labour, capital, and land in the EU agricultural sector, the magnitude and direction of technical change, and the impact of the CAP subsidies. The system of equations is estimated using the GMM estimator on a farm-level panel dataset covering 117,179 farms from all EU MS for the period from 2004 to 2015. Our results suggest that land, labour, and capital in EU farms are complementary production factors characterised by a slow decline or stagnation in the land-, labour-, and capital-augmented technical change. Higher levels of Pillar I and Pillar II CAP payments as percentage of total agricultural income have negative or no impact on farms’ technical change, but higher nominal amounts of Pillar I decoupled subsidies, Pillar II investment and LFA subsidies have a positive impact. Moreover, the larger the share of subsidies in total agricultural income the stronger is the negative impact of the CAP on agricultural technical change.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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45.
Food politics and development Leach, Melissa; Nisbett, Nicholas; Cabral, Lídia ...
World development,
10/2020, Volume:
134
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
•Current food systems are unsustainable and inequitable, requiring political transformation to meet development goals.•Understanding food politics requires combining plural approaches underpinned by ...diverse theories of power.•Problematiques around food production, consumption and nutrition illustrate material and knowledge politics across scales.•A 4Ds framework highlights Directions, Distribution, Diversity and Democracy in pathways of food system change.•Future food politics research agendas require triangulation amongst approaches, interdisciplinarity and engagement.
Food has become both a pivotal topic in development and a lens through which to integrate and address a range of contemporary global challenges. This review article addresses in particular the interrelationship between food and sustainable, equitable development, arguing that this is fundamentally political. We offer a set of approaches to understanding food politics, each underlain by broader theoretical traditions in power analysis, focused respectively on food interests and incentives; food regimes; food institutions; food innovation systems; food contentions and movements; food discourses, and food socio-natures. Applications of these approaches are then illustrated through a set of problematiques, providing a (selective) overview of some of the major literatures and topics of note in food politics and development. Starting with the role of the state and state-society relations in different forms of food regime, we then consider the role of science and technology (and its discourses) in shaping agricultural and food policy directions before looking in more detail at rural livelihoods in agri-food systems and the politics of inclusive structural transformation. Broadening beyond agri-food systems then brings us to interrogate dominant narratives of nutrition and review literature on the cultural politics of food and eating. A concluding section provides a synthesis across the cases, drawing together the various approaches to power and politics and showing how they might be integrated via an analytical framework which combines plural approaches to describe different pathways of change and intervention, raising critical questions about the overall direction and diversity of these pathways, their distributional effects, and the extent of democratic inclusion in decisions about food pathways. We find this extended ‘4D’ approach helpful in highlighting current food systems inequities and the political options for future food systems change, and conclude by considering how it might be harnessed as part of a future interdisciplinary, engaged research agenda.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Summary
In order to keep pace with the evolution of the objectives and means of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, evaluation tools also need to adapt. A set of tools that have proved highly ...effective in other policy fields is economic experiments. These allow the testing of a new policy before its implementation, provide evidence of its specific effects, and identify behavioural dimensions that can influence policy outcomes. We argue that agricultural policy should be subject to economic experiments, providing examples to illustrate how they can inform CAP design. We identify the additional efforts needed to establish further proof‐of‐concept, by running more – and more robust – experiments related to the CAP. This can happen only by integrating experimental evaluation results within the policy cycle and addressing ethical and practical challenges seriously. To do so, researchers would benefit from a concerted European effort to promote the methodology across the EU; organise the replication in time and across Europe of experiments relevant for the CAP; and build a multi‐national panel of farmers willing to participate in experiments. Steps are being taken in this direction by the Research Network of Economics Experiments for CAP evaluation (REECAP).
Face à l'évolution des objectifs et des moyens de la politique agricole commune de l'Union européenne, les outils d'évaluation doivent également s'adapter. Les expérimentations économiques sont un ensemble d'outils qui se sont avérés très efficaces dans d'autres domaine d’action des pouvoirs publics. Elles permettent de tester une nouvelle politique avant sa mise en œuvre, fournissent des informations sur les effets spécifiques de cette politique et identifient les dimensions comportementales qui peuvent influencer ses résultats. Nous soutenons que la politique agricole devrait être l’objet d’expérimentations économiques et fournissons des exemples pour illustrer comment celles‐ci peuvent éclairer la formulation de la PAC. Nous identifions les efforts supplémentaires nécessaires pour établir d'autres preuves de concept, en menant des expérimentations liées à la PAC plus nombreuses ‐ et plus robustes. Cela ne peut se faire qu'en intégrant les résultats des évaluations expérimentales dans le cycle de la politique et en s'attaquant sérieusement aux défis éthiques et pratiques. Pour ce faire, les chercheurs bénéficieraient d'un effort européen concerté pour promouvoir la méthodologie à travers l'Union européenne ; organiser la réplication dans le temps et à travers l'Europe d'expérimentations pertinentes pour la PAC ; et constituer un panel multinational d'agriculteurs désireux de participer à ces expérimentations. Des mesures sont prises dans ce sens par le Réseau de recherche sur les expérimentations économiques pour l'évaluation de la PAC (REECAP).
Um mit der Weiterentwicklung der Ziele und Maßnahmen der Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik (GAP) mithalten zu können, müssen auch die Evaluierungsmethoden angepasst werden. Eine Methode, welche bereits in anderen Politikbereichen sehr effektiv eingesetzt werden konnte, sind ökonomische Experimente. Diese bieten die Möglichkeit, eine neue Politik vor ihrer Umsetzung zu testen. Sie liefern Erkenntnisse über ihre spezifische Wirkung und identifizieren Verhaltensbereiche, die die Ergebnisse der Politik beeinflussen können. Aus unserer Sicht sollte die Agrarpolitik Gegenstand von ökonomischen Experimenten sein. Wir zeigen anhand von Beispielen, wie diese zur Gestaltung der GAP beitragen können. Darüber hinaus weisen wir auf zusätzlich Anstrengungen hin, die für einen weiteren Machbarkeitsnachweis erforderlich sind, nämlich die Durchführung von mehr ‐ und robusteren ‐ Experimenten in Bezug auf die GAP. Dies kann nur durch die Einbindung von experimentellen Evaluationsergebnissen in den Politikablauf und die ernsthafte Auseinandersetzung mit ethischen und praktischen Herausforderungen umgesetzt werden. Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, wäre es für die Forschung sinnvoll, wenn eine konzertierte europäische Initiative die Methode in der gesamten EU verbreiten würde. Die Initiative müsste auch die zeitliche und europaweite Wiederholung der auf die GAP bezogenen Experimente organisieren. Des Weiteren müsste ein multinationales Panel an Landwirtinnen und Landwirten aufgebaut werden, die bereit wären, an den Experimenten teilzunehmen. Schritte in diese Richtung werden bereits vom Forschungsnetzwerk für Ökonomische Experimente für die GAP‐Evaluierung (REECAP) unternommen.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The study of policy reform has tended to focus on single‐stage reforms taking place over a relatively short period. Recent research has drawn attention to gradual policy changes unfolding over ...extended periods. One strategy of gradual change is layering, in which new policy dimensions are introduced by adding new policy instruments or by redesigning existing ones to address new concerns. The limited research on single‐stage policy reforms highlights that these may not endure in the postenactment phase when circumstances change. We argue that gradual policy layering may create sustainability dynamics that can result in lasting reform trajectories. The European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has changed substantially over the last three decades in response to emerging policy concerns by adding new layers. This succession of reforms proved durable and resilient to reversal in the lead‐up to the 2013 CAP reform when institutional and political circumstances changed.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Global sustainable development challenges affect the agricultural sector, and many innovations aimed at addressing these challenges have been introduced in the agri-food sector. In this complex ...context, new agricultural policies are being implemented in Europe. Their success depends on their potential to adapt to new realities, responding to the opinions and demands of the European population. Given the rapid rise of social media as an important part of people's daily lives, public administrations have introduced digitalization and communication strategies through social media sites. Social media can provide policymakers with large amounts of data on user opinions. Given the value of social media as a rich source of data on public views and opinions, the aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to use natural language processing (NLP) to identify the events that have led to negative or positive opinion about European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform and (ii) to evaluate the ability of NLP to study users' opinions on Twitter/X. The findings show that issues such as Brexit, the European Green Deal, the role of CAP in the environment, livestock farming, food safety, and illegal practices and corruption in the distribution of CAP funds have crucial implications for the design and application of the new CAP. Moreover, the study also suggests that NLP techniques can provide opportunities to integrate agricultural policies and instruments in the agri-food sector by assessing society's opinions. Sentiment analysis, even considering its limitations, could support sound and inclusive policymaking approaches anticipating public opinion in cases of risk of social unrest.
•Natural language processing techniques offer opportunities for agricultural policy.•Sentiment analysis serves as an assessment tool for agricultural and rural policies.•Natural language processing techniques identify social sentiment on global issues.•Social media enriches agricultural policy design and assessment.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
In this article, we contribute to the literature on (post-)exceptionalism by analysing and explaining the development of a specific policy sub-arrangement of the European Union's Common Agricultural ...Policy (CAP): its monitoring and evaluation (M&E) arrangement. As M&E have become common in many policy sectors, this arrangement seems an example of common policy being integrated in the CAP, reflecting non-exceptionalism. To answer the question to what extent M&E policy ideas are indeed integrated in the CAP we adopt a policy arrangement approach and analyse the interaction of institutions and ideas found in the broader EU M&E and CAP policy arrangements during two reforms of the CAP. We conclude that general ideas on M&E have been incorporated in the CAP M&E arrangement, but only to a limited extent. Existing institutions (and resulting interests) of the broader CAP arrangement prevent a full integration of these ideas. This leads to the general conclusion that the M&E sub-arrangement in the CAP is characterized by post-exceptionalism.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
We analyze the farm‐level economic and environmental impacts of the post‐2020 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union, examining six scenarios constructed around the ...budget allocated to eco‐schemes and the stringency of enhanced conditionality. Results suggest that the CAP post‐2020 can improve environmental performance but at a cost for farms. Enhanced conditionality appears to play a greater role than eco‐schemes in delivering environmental improvements. The new CAP provides the Member States ample options to choose among different measures. The optimal policy mix will depend on the balancing of income support versus environmental performance that reflects policy priorities.
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