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The latest Common Agricultural Policy reform intends to expand and strengthen environmental and social support and to liberalise the delivery model carried out through strategic planning. This paper aims to assess the potential impacts of the new CAP reform on the main agricultural markets in Croatia. The impact assessment is analysed using the AGMEMOD model where, in addition to the baseline scenario, three scenarios of potential changes are developed and compared to the baseline. Changes in market patterns (production, yield and net trade) at the end of the simulated period are compared with the baseline scenario results by 2030. The reduction in support levels to production, abolishment of voluntary coupled supports and introduction of additional environmental constraints have a significant impact on the main Croatian agricultural markets. Crop markets prov to be less dependent on subsidies, so that market pattern changes will not mean the loss of Croatia’s net export status for soft wheat, maize and soy beans, while barley no longer holds this status. Livestock sectors, especially beef and dairy, in addition to demonstrating a distinct lack of competitiveness even before the Croatian accession to the EU, additionally suffer significant production volume losses along with an increase in imports. Although significant, changes to the Croatian agricultural market are not dramatic enough to cause a complete production breakdown by 2030.

The paper investigates the relative influence of landscape characteristics, production intensity and the EU’s Common agricultural policy interventions on the diversity of farmland birds. For this purpose, data from the Farmland Bird Monitoring Scheme in Slovenia and high spatial resolution data from the national agricultural databases in the period 2008–2019 were analysed with the Boosted Regression Trees (BRT). The diversity of farmland birds was found to be highest in open, diversely cropped and extensively to moderately intensively managed landscapes in Natura 2000 sites where farm holdings were allocated a low average amount of both direct payments and payments for agri-environmental measures (AEM) and organic farming (OF). Furthermore, the highest diversity of the subgroup of grassland specialists was associated with very open and extensively managed grassland landscapes with low stocking density (

In the European Union (EU), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is considered to be the critical public policy in terms of both impacts and funds dedicated to nature conservation, yet the goal of halting biodiversity loss in the EU remains elusive. The present paper examines the degree of biodiversity policy integration into the CAP and the quality of policy programming in a selected EU Member State in the 2014–2020 period. We use a heuristic model combining an assessment of biodiversity policy integration and a program theory analysis of the policy’s logic model. In addition, the elaboration of the logic model for other agricultural policy objectives, relevance and potential effects of measures and allocation of budgetary funds are evaluated for comparative purposes. The program logic model was found to be only loosely defined for most objectives of Slovenian agricultural policy. At the strategic level, the integration of biodiversity policy is limited to instruments that remunerate above-standard farming practices, investments and payments to areas with natural constraints. In contrast, the inclusion and consistency of biodiversity conservation in instruments supporting standard practices (e.g. direct payment schemes) is addressed only to a limited extent. Given their design and implementation, fewer than 10 % of relevant measures were judged to have strong or significant potential effects and will thus probably only partly meet the policy objectives. Finally, biodiversity conservation (estimated 5% of the total agricultural policy budget), as well as other environmental objectives (22–23 %), have a significantly lower priority than incomeand production-related objectives (54–60 %). The future CAP should include adequate safeguards and incentives to improve the quality of programming and integration of biodiversity policy, particularly since an increasing emphasis is given to decision-making at the national level. However, although the post-2020 CAP programming system could, in principle, be seen as a step forward, there remains a high risk of underperformance in the field of biodiversity conservation in the EU Member States.

Since the 1980s, the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy has undergone a series of reforms that were facilitated by the changes in decision-making rules such as the introduction of the qualified majority vote. This article argues that the introduction of the co-decision procedure under the Lisbon Treaty, which increased the European Parliament’s legislative powers, has generated a “co-decision trap” that has hindered further reforms.

This technical note provides the detailed projection results of the study “Modelling and Analysis of the European Milk and Dairy Market”.

This technical note provides the detailed projection results of the study “Modelling and Analysis of the European Milk and Dairy Market”.

This report is based on the outcome of a study carried out by the AGMEMOD Consortium under the management of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute (LEI), in cooperation with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre – Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC-IPTS). The report provides a quantitative assessment of possible implications of a dairy policy reform and other policy adjustments on the milk and dairy market as well as on other agricultural markets in the EU-27, EU-15, EU-12, the individual Member States and their regional groupings using the AGMEMOD model.

This paper's aim is an assessment of economic effects of Slovenia's accession to the EU in the field of agriculture and a discussion about some key dilemmas about the introduction of CAP in the new member states. For the purpose of assessing economic effects, a new sectoral model of Slovenian agriculture APAS-PAM has been compiled which allows assessment of market and income effects for ten key agricultural products with regard to various accession scenarios. The accession under the scenario of equal treatment of new member states would bring significant improvements in the aggregate income levels. On the other hand, discrimination of the candidate countries in the field of direct payments ("phasing in" process) would result in a fall of aggregate income level by an eighth. Moreover, noncompetitive production structures in the food-processing sector would deteriorate the economic situation of agricultural production by up to further 40 %. The positive effects of different accession scenarios are expected in the sugar beet and - under assumption of eligibility for direct payments - also in coarse grains, beef and sheep meat production. The economic situation in milk production is not expected to change significantly. The negative accession effects can be expected in pigmeat, cereal, egg and, potentially, poultry production. The results reveal a great significance of the equal treatment and differentiation approach to negotiation process for the preservation of the economic situation of Slovenian agriculture after accession. This holds especially for cereal, beef and sheep meat production.