We must thank our colleague Tania Runge for today’s publication, who recently sent us a publication carried out by IFOAM Organics Europe entitled “Organic in Europe”.

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This entity has developed new research that highlights the insufficiency of both State Members and European Union aids and the need to dedicate part of the CAP budget to organic farming in order to achieve the Farm to Fork and Biodiversity Strategy’s objectives of 25% organic land by the year 2030.

Because, according to this study, the European Union should dedicate – from the year 2023 – 3 to 5 times the current amount of the CAP budget to achieve the proposed objectives.

The researchers point out that in order to achieve 25% of organic land in the European Union before the year 2030, it will be necessary for Member States to make more efforts, increasing payment rates per hectare; and those countries with a low level of support for the primary sector should increase their spending by 5 or 6 times if they want to achieve realistic objectives.

Researchers complain about insufficient efforts carried out by the European Union to achieve the objectives, since it should triple its organic surface in the period 2019-2023; increase CAP spending 3-5 times by 2030 and dedicate 9-15% of the CAP budget to organic.

Emmanouil Tyllianakis and Julia Martin-Ortega, from the School of Earth and Environment, Sustainability Research Institute, at the University of Leeds have written a magnificent publication in the scientific journal “Land Use Policy” (Editorial Elsevier) that we want to recommend to you.

This research article systematically reviews and quantifies the academic literature that researches the factors that influence farmers’ enrolment in agri-environment schemes (AES). A long-time staple of EU policy, AES are considered as means to provide environmental and biodiversity benefits to society by compensating farmers to adopt sustainable agricultural practices and set land aside from farming. The main take away message is this: farmers’ are, in principle, willing to enrol in AES to deliver biodiversity and environmental features, but we are not yet hitting the right keys on how to best match farmers preferences. A significant leap forward would not simply require an increased quantity of primary studies, but a deeper reflexion on how the complexity of farmers’ preferences is best captured in the design of policy instruments that have to both share common features while being adaptable to context dependent characteristics at the landscape level

Objective

In their 35-year presence in EU policy, research has identified several characteristics of AES that can influence land managers’ acceptance, such as the requirement of monitoring of results achieve, the availability of free scientific advice to farmers and the option for AES that run more than 5 years. These factors, along with farm and sociodemographic characteristics are examined in this work in terms of their influence on the monetary compensation farmers ask to enrol in AES.

Methodology

This study employs the meta-analysis method, that allows to bring together findings from similar studies across different years and geographical locations. Meta-regressions were also used to quantify the impact of such variables on the compensation EU farmers ask to enrol in AES.

Results

Results come from around 25 studies from across the EU over a 10-year period and had significant variation from study to study. The mean compensation EU farmers ask for enrolling in AES is estimated to be around 327 Euros, per hectare. Factors such as farmer income, offering of scientific advice and support to farmers during their AES contract are found to incentivise adoption. As such, the authors suggest that tailored AES policies are the way forward, especially to incentivise managers of small land holdings and achieve landscape-wide environmental improvements.

Again, we are happy to send you the information regarding a publication carried out by our colleagues from the CONSOLE project, Daniele Vergamini, Matteo Olivieri, María Andreoli (University of Pisa) and Fabio Bartolini (University of Ferrara).

The research is titled “Innovative Contract Solutions for the Provision of Agri-Environmental Climatic Public Goods: A Literature Review” and they begin by arguing how the absence of public funding and the deterioration of the environment due to anthropic actions is encouraging the search for innovative mechanisms, that promote the provision of agri-environmental climate public goods (AECPG) by farmers.

The authors argue that the main failures of the current policy regime stem from the inability of policy makers to cope with the heterogeneity of private costs to produce agri-environmental goods in agrarian areas. This has caused innovative solutions to be sought.

Methodology

Faced with this situation, the researchers have carried out a systematic bibliographic review where the potential results-based collective contracts as innovative solutions are analysed in comparison with action-based instruments (most used today).

Results

Obviously, we are not going to reveal the research results here, as we want you to read this interesting research article.

The findings related to the type of external environment are collected by policy environment (choice of the type of policy, type of most suitable contract or implementation of the contract), agricultural and social environment (behaviour and knowledge of farmers) and ecological environment (inappropriate behaviour related to high productivity and scarce supply of Agri-environmental goods) that must be taken into consideration when developing strategies.

Likewise, the researchers highlight the importance of the innovative solutions included in the publications to avoid errors in the policies, propose discriminatory payment systems or new mechanisms of action.