Empirical analysis of sustainability trade-offs in EU agri-food production by combining indicator-based policy performance assessment with a theory-consistent production framework

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Christine Wieck
• Subject Area: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 491146805

Since years, the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has been criticized for failing to tackle current and future environmental and for not achieving its self-proclaimed objectives. To improve this, in the latest CAP reform, the EU commission has proposed an indicator-based measurement of the policy performance. The agri-food sector is a complex system with manifold trade-offs (complementarities, substitutes, synergies) between agri-food production, environmental sustainability and societal demands. Hence, any performance measurement must carefully consider these trade-offs. Given the scientific state-of-the-art the following central hypothesis for the proposed research project is derived: Indicator-based policy performance assessment is not sufficient to steer the sustainable development of the agri-food sector in the presence of trade-offs between production and provision of food, bio-based products and public goods. Consequently, the indicator-based performance framework must be extended so that the trade-offs can be assessed systematically in a theory-consistent way. This proposed research project addresses this research gap. Hence, the overall research objective of the project is to combine indicator-based policy outcome assessment with a theory consistent production economics approach to jointly assess the current state and changes in the production and provision of food, bio-based products and public goods in a comparable regional approach across EU regions and over time. For this, first, in a production theory consistent framework the systematisation of trade-offs between the production and provision of food, bio-based products and public goods is done; second, linkages between indicators, changes over time and comparison across regions are analysed with the objective to condense the number of indictors and to potentially identify “umbrella” indicators”; and third, regional production possibility frontiers are econometrically estimated to evaluate opportunity costs and trade offs across regions and time. The project is innovative as it extends an existent theory-consistent approach to the context of production and provision of food, bio-based products and public goods, as it transfers the concept of “umbrella indicators” from the ecological sciences to the agricultural policy sphere, and as it provides a monetary estimates of opportunity costs that show the sustainability trade-offs inherent in current agricultural policy making. The results of this research project (theoretical systematization of sustainability trade-offs, umbrella indicators, opportunity costs) can be used to inform policy makers and stakeholders about these trade-offs and thus may contribute to the fact base for decisions about the future path of the EU agri-food sector. The information about regional opportunity costs arising from these trade-offs may be a valuable input for large-scale modelling systems.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants