Assessing the contribution of public investments in agriculture and research in agricultural production in Europe is the aim of the scientific publication recently accepted by our project partners Meri Raggi and Davide Viaggi; as well as a Michele Vollaro (University of Bologna, Italy)

To develop the journal article, they have taken into account two fundamental elements:

The first is found in a “literature review” on the connection between public investment, development (R&D) and agricultural productivity.

In a second place the “Availability and Selection of data“, which summarizes spending on agricultural R&D and agricultural productivity measures.

Methodology

The methodology proposed by the researchers begins by arguing the lack of a common established and consensus in the methodologies that study the impact of agricultural R&D on the economy; of which they make a magnificent review of the various approaches of the authors or of the various geographical regions (as is the case of Europe and the United States).

For the research, they analysed the impact of public R&D on agricultural productivity at the aggregate level, using data from 16 representative countries. With these data, the RoR (agricultural productivity and rates of return) of public spending on research in Europe was estimated.

Likewise, the authors emphasize the cost-benefit analysis as an effective methodology to evaluate the economic impact on the computation of R&D investments.

Results

Obviously, we will not show the results of the research in this post, although we will make some clarifications.

Southern European countries support the hypothesis that agricultural research is more adaptive rather than basic, and expect research on this topic to be shorter than the suggested 50 years.

The results have shown positive and negative effects; as well as the need to include more variables that could affect agricultural productivity, such as climate, meteorological anomalies, private investment in research, etc.

However, the results corroborate the hypothesis that research spending has a generally positive impact on productivity.

In the blog post on the CONSOLE project, we want to recommend a post by Francois Bareille, Matteo Zavalloni, Meri Raggi and Davide Viaggi; being developed during Related Project LIFT (Low-Input Farming and Territories – Integrating knowledge for improving ecosystem-based farming ).

The Summary ago reference to the important role of farmers in the management of ecosystem services, thus relating to part of the objective pursued by CONSOLE. The bibliographic review, as the authors indicate, points to a benefit for those actors who act in a coordinated way, compared to those who are not coordinated.

However, the public good nature of these ecosystem services may hamper the emergence of a cooperative solution at the landscape scale.

There are no doubts that biodiversity and ecosystem services depend on the structure of the landscape, which are related to the decisions of farmers. For example, maintaining the connectivity of natural habitats (ecological corridors).

For instance, they are habitats of pollinators or insect predators of pests -, which contribute to the value of the harvest.

Research objectives

The objective of the research was threefold:

1. The first was to look for the size and composition of stable coalitions of farmers willing to cooperate with pollination services, and to what extent they produce economic gains.
2. The second objective was to investigate the role of landscape structure in cooperation and conservation outcomes.
3. Finally, the last objective was to evaluate how the different public policies aimed at habitat conservation affect the stability of the coalition. In addition, the researchers wanted to know if a policy design that encourages cooperation among farmers would lead to improvements in budget effectiveness.

To achieve the purposes, they formulated a spatially explicit bioeconomic model of nine farmers who can dedicate part of their arable land to semi-natural habitats (flowers, hedges, etc.)