Redistributive effects of CAP liberalisation: from the sectoral level to single farm

There is a growing public and political interest in effects of agricultural policy on income distribuion in the agricultural sector. Most of the literature regarding redistributive effects of agricultural policy is ex-post and static in nature and many tools for an ex-ante analysis of impacts of sectoral or macroeconomic policies depict farm groups or representative farms rather than individual farms. However, the measurement of inequality is highly sensitive to the aggregation of individual data. In this paper, redistributive effects of an abolishment of different instruments of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) are analysed with a tool that is able to consistently assess impacts of sectoral policy on individual farm incomes. We find that an abolishment of the main components of the CAP, direct payments and market and price policies, results in a more unequal income distribution in relative terms, but a more equal income distribution in absolute terms. Based on the latter, we conclude that if the CAP aims at a more equal income distrbution within the agricultural sector, then significant scope for improving the design of respective policy instruments exists

The market impacts of shortening feed supply chains in Europe

Recently, consumers’ awareness regarding food production has increased, leading to a growing focus on shorter food supply chains and regional or local food systems. In the livestock sector, these developments are closely related to a regionalization of feed production. At the same time, a low self-sufficiency rate in protein feed is being reported for many European countries. In this paper, we analyze market impacts resulting from a complete switch to regionally produced feed in the European livestock sector. We simulate a shortening of feed supply chains in European livestock production using a large-scale agricultural sector model. Livestock production was restricted to feed that can be produced within the same EU member state. Our work represents a first step towards a simulation of regional or local food systems. The results reveal large increases in the prices of livestock products in Europe due to the shortening of feed supply chains. This is a result of a significant increase in livestock production costs. The ability to supply livestock products with regionally produced feed in the EU would be improved through a reduced consumption of livestock products

Increasing crop production in Russia and Ukraine—regional and global impacts from intensification and recultivation

Russia and Ukraine are countries with relatively large untapped agricultural potentials, both in terms of abandoned agricultural land and substantial yield gaps. Here we present a comprehensive assessment of Russian and Ukrainian crop production potentials and we analyze possible impacts of their future utilization, on a regional as well as global scale. To this end, the total amount of available abandoned land and potential yields in Russia and Ukraine are estimated and explicitly implemented in an economic agricultural sector model. We find that cereal (barley, corn, and wheat) production in Russia and Ukraine could increase by up to 64% in 2030 to 267 million tons, compared to a baseline scenario. Oilseeds (rapeseed, soybean, and sunflower) production could increase by 84% to 50 million tons, respectively. In comparison to the baseline, common net exports of Ukraine and Russia could increase by up to 86.3 million tons of cereals and 18.9 million tons of oilseeds in 2030, representing 4% and 3.6% of the global production of these crops, respectively. Furthermore, we find that production potentials due to intensification are ten times larger than potentials due to recultivation of abandoned land. Consequently, we also find stronger impacts from intensification at the global scale. A utilization of crop production potentials in Russia and Ukraine could globally save up to 21 million hectares of cropland and reduce average global crop prices by more than 3%

Problems of Agricultural Policy Adaptation Within Sustainable Development Goals

The paper reveals problems of integrating national policy for increasing agricultural production and ecological consequences, including the important aspect of Russia’s ratification of the Paris Agreement on climate, which provides additional opportunities for a decrease in carbon emissions. Current government programs for agricultural development in Russia, which include but are not limited to production growth and increase in agricultural exports, do not take into account the ecological consequences of such growth. The paper analyzes how the agriculture of Russia has evolved in the recent period (2007-2017) and what amount of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions it has caused. Although in general emissions exhibited a decreasing trend, it was found that ploughing additional land for crop production had caused a large outburst of emissions from a small amount of land. Using the GLOBIOM partial equilibrium model, two scenarios of Russia's agricultural development until 2030 were formulated. The first one is intensive, with only a small amount of crop area growth but with a 45% increase in yields compared to current levels. The second scenario is an extensive one, with crop area growth of additional 6.4 million hectares and a total yield increase of 24% compared to current levels. Results have shown that crop and meat production increase in both scenarios, but the extensive one involves more emissions from additional ploughed land. To stop these kinds of practices, the recommendations would be to limit the ploughing of additional land and to improve statistical bookkeeping for a more accurate inclusion of land use and respective GHG emissions

Multiple Rotations of Gaussian Quadratures: An Efficient Method for Uncertainty Analyses in Large-Scale Simulation Models

Concerns regarding the impact of climate change, food price volatility, and weather uncertainty have motivated users of simulation models to consider uncertainty in their simulations. One way to do this is to integrate uncertainty components in the model equations, thus turning the model into a problem of numerical integration. Most of these problems do not have analytical solutions, and researchers, therefore, apply numerical approximation methods. This article presents a novel approach to conducting an uncertainty analysis as an alternative to the computationally burdensome Monte Carlo-based (MC) methods. The developed method is based on the degree three Gaussian quadrature (GQ) formulae and is tested using three large-scale simulation models. While a standard single GQ method often produces low-quality approximations, the results of this study demonstrate that the proposed approach reduces the approximation errors by a factor of nine using only 3.4% of the computational effort required by the MC-based methods in the most computationally demanding model

Improving high-resolution spatial information on agricultural land use management in Europe for economic land use modelling and the assessment of policy impacts

There is currently a lack of high-resolution pan-European information on land use management, especially in terms of how intensively and extensively cropland and grassland are managed. This is partly due to the lack of ground-based information, which is needed to downscale these types of management practices (some of which are captured in different types of agricultural censuses and surveys) as well as the inability of remote sensing to capture different kinds of land use. This type of information is needed for economic land use modelling and for assessing policy impacts, such as the latest reforms from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and other European Union (EU) Green Deal targets. These types of analyses are undertaken using economic land use models such as GLOBIOM and CAPRI, which is one of the main aims of the Horizon Europe funded LAMASUS project (https://www.lamasus.eu/). This presentation will provide an overview of the ongoing developments in creating high-resolution spatially explicit layers on agricultural and grassland management for Europe to support the LAMASUS project. The proposed cropland and grassland management classes will be outlined along with the methodology for how they have been implemented using existing data layers from remote sensing, statistical data from Eurostat, the Joint Research Centre of the EU, agricultural ministries, and other sources. One of the key challenges is ensuring that the high-resolution data matches official statistics at the national (and NUTS2 level where available) so that they can be used by the economic land use models in LAMASUS. A method will be presented for how this is achieved using priors in the form of integrated layers of cropland and grassland probability created from existing high-resolution remotely sensed input layers

A Study of Time-Dependent CP-Violating Asymmetries and Flavor Oscillations in Neutral B Decays at the Upsilon(4S)

We present a measurement of time-dependent CP-violating asymmetries in neutral B meson decays collected with the BABAR detector at the PEP-II asymmetric-energy B Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The data sample consists of 29.7 ${\rm fb}^{-1}$ recorded at the $\Upsilon(4S)$ resonance and 3.9 ${\rm fb}^{-1}$ off-resonance. One of the neutral B mesons, which are produced in pairs at the $\Upsilon(4S)$, is fully reconstructed in the CP decay modes $J/\psi K^0_S$, $\psi(2S) K^0_S$, $\chi_{c1} K^0_S$, $J/\psi K^{*0}$ ($K^{*0}\to K^0_S\pi^0$) and $J/\psi K^0_L$, or in flavor-eigenstate modes involving $D^{(*)}\pi/\rho/a_1$ and $J/\psi K^{*0}$ ($K^{*0}\to K^+\pi^-$). The flavor of the other neutral B meson is tagged at the time of its decay, mainly with the charge of identified leptons and kaons. The proper time elapsed between the decays is determined by measuring the distance between the decay vertices. A maximum-likelihood fit to this flavor eigenstate sample finds $\Delta m_d = 0.516\pm 0.016 {\rm (stat)} \pm 0.010 {\rm (syst)} {\rm ps}^{-1}$. The value of the asymmetry amplitude $\sin2\beta$ is determined from a simultaneous maximum-likelihood fit to the time-difference distribution of the flavor-eigenstate sample and about 642 tagged $B^0$ decays in the CP-eigenstate modes. We find $\sin2\beta=0.59\pm 0.14 {\rm (stat)} \pm 0.05 {\rm (syst)}$, demonstrating that CP violation exists in the neutral B meson system. (abridged)Comment: 58 pages, 35 figures, submitted to Physical Review