Changing governance in the EU milk supply chain

With the 2008 EU’s CAP reform the governance of the EU’s dairy sector changes. This paper focuses on governance structures between dairy farms and milk processors. To get insight in regional differences within the EU, a literature research and interviews are conducted in three case study areas, namely: the Netherlands, Bulgaria and France. Results show that in these countries both farmers and processors have incentives to form hybrid governance structures with a higher level of control compared to the current structures. Most dairy cooperatives have no additional advantage in managing milk quality and milk supply compared to investor owned firms. Chain integration could go a step further in Bulgaria compared to the Netherlands and France given the institutional environment that is not expected to guarantee milk quality and the focus on the export of milk

Assessing the impact of different rural development policy design options on the adoption of innovation across five case studies in EU

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the enterprise and industry development process in agriculture. The objective of the paper is to provide an ex-ante analysis of the effectiveness of alternative policy design options concerning the RDP measures intended to provide incentives for investment/innovation adoption in five case study areas across Europe. The model implemented is based on a real option approach that includes investment irreversibility and stochasticity in SFP. The results show the relevance of uncertainty in determining the timing of adoption and emphasise the importance of predictability as a major component of policy design

Assessing the impact of different rural development policy design options on the adoption of innovation across five case studies in EU

Innovation and new technology adoption represent two central elements for the enterprise and industry development process in agriculture. The objective of the paper is to provide an ex-ante analysis of the effectiveness of alternative policy design options concerning the RDP measures intended to provide incentives for investment/innovation adoption in five case study areas across Europe. The model implemented is based on a real option approach that includes investment irreversibility and stochasticity in SFP. The results show the relevance of uncertainty in determining the timing of adoption and emphasise the importance of predictability as a major component of policy design.real options, innovation, rural development policy, single farm payments, uncertainty, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Representing migration routes from re-encounter data: a new method applied to ring recoveries of Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica) in Europe

Bird ringing was established more than a century ago to gather information on bird movements. Since then, ornithologists have systematically collected huge databases of records of birds ringed and subsequently re-encountered, but, to date, there have been few quantitative attempts to identify migratory routes from ringing data. Here, we develop a novel, quantitative method for describing migration routes using ringing data and we applied it to a dataset of 72,827 ring recoveries of the Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) through western and central Europe from the EURING and SAFRING databanks spanning 1908\u20132011. We considered movements of 332 individuals during spring migration and 1509 during autumn migration. The results indicate that, in spring, Barn Swallows enter western Europe through Gibraltar or by crossing the Mediterranean Sea through the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the Italian peninsula. They then spread over a wide front. In northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands routes diverge, pointing toward either the British Isles or Denmark and Scandinavia. Autumn migration routes are similar to those in spring. The general migration pattern that emerged from the analyses was consistent with previous descriptions of migratory movements of this well-known species. However, this analysis also revealed some previously undocumented migration patterns. For instance, in spring, some migrants moved from the Balearic Islands to Corsica and Italy, thus making a rather long eastward crossing of the Mediterranean Sea. In autumn, some migrants moved from the Balkan Peninsula westwards toward Italy. Analyses restricted to recoveries within the same spring or the same autumn and to birds found dead showed similar patterns. Our procedure was, therefore, able to identify migration patterns over a large geographical area, and may be extended to those species for which large datasets of ring recoveries or sight-resight data are available

The great tit HapMap project: a continental‐scale analysis of genomic variation in a songbird

A major aim of evolutionary biology is to understand why patterns of genomic diversity vary within taxa and space. Large-scale genomic studies of widespread species are useful for studying how environment and demography shape patterns of genomic divergence. Here, we describe one of the most geographically comprehensive surveys of genomic variation in a wild vertebrate to date; the great tit (Parus major) HapMap project. We screened ca 500,000 SNP markers across 647 individuals from 29 populations, spanning ~30 degrees of latitude and 40 degrees of longitude – almost the entire geographical range of the European subspecies. Genome-wide variation was consistent with a recent colonisation across Europe from a South-East European refugium, with bottlenecks and reduced genetic diversity in island populations. Differentiation across the genome was highly heterogeneous, with clear ‘islands of differentiation’, even among populations with very low levels of genome-wide differentiation. Low local recombination rates were a strong predictor of high local genomic differentiation (FST), especially in island and peripheral mainland populations, suggesting that the interplay between genetic drift and recombination causes highly heterogeneous differentiation landscapes. We also detected genomic outlier regions that were confined to one or more peripheral great tit populations, probably as a result of recent directional selection at the species' range edges. Haplotype-based measures of selection were related to recombination rate, albeit less strongly, and highlighted population-specific sweeps that likely resulted from positive selection. Our study highlights how comprehensive screens of genomic variation in wild organisms can provide unique insights into spatio-temporal evolutionary dynamics

Make EU trade with Brazil sustainable

Cellular mechanisms in basic and clinical gastroenterology and hepatolog