Category: News

SURE-Farm has just issued a new policy brief on the principles that the farming systems and the enabling environments should implement to foster resilience in Euroepan agriulture.

The principles are:

• to use resources to help the FS to deal with a shock only to buy time while working on structural solutions.
• to devote enough resources to building anticipating and responsive capacities when shocks happen.
• to detect long term trends and their potential impact on the FS.
• to foster a diversity of potential options.
• to develop a sufficient degree of ambidexterity
• to do in-depth analysis of root causes of challenges and the FS’s vulnerability to them.

Implementing these principles into concrete actions and strategies requires social learning and concerted efforts by all actors involved.

Click here and read the policy brief!

Contact:

Dr. Erwin Wauters, erwin.wauters@ilvo.vlaanderen.be

Senior Researcher on the Economic, Social and Institutional Aspects of Farming and Food Systems. Flanders Research Institute for Agricultural, Fisheries and Food Research, – Social Sciences Unit

Farming systems operate in biophysical, political, social, economic and cultural environments which are often far from stable. Frequently or unfavourably changing conditions can affect farming systems’ performance, i.e., the delivery of  functions such as food production or ecosystem services.

You can find in this report  six general principles underpinning patterns that enable the resilience of Farming Systems. As the authors hihglight, an important challenge is that farming systems and enabling environments should always find a good balance between addressing challenges in the short run and dealing with challenges in the long run.

Click here to read the report!

Authors:

Erik Mathijs, Jo Bijttebier, Francesco Accatino, Peter Feindt, Camelia Gavrilescu, Gordana Manevska-Tasevska, Miranda Meuwissen, Franziska Ollendorf, Mariya Peneva, Carolina San Martín, Simone Severini, Alisa Spiegel, Mauro Vigani, Katarzyna Zawalińska, Erwin Wauters.

Corresponding author:

Erik Mathijs (erik.mathijs@kuleuven.be)

A new report has just been issued!

This report investigates the drivers of EU regions’ expenditure towards the Risk Management Toolkit of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) by applying and comparing four types of regional-level spatial models, namely a spatial error model, a spatial autoregressive model, a spatial lag of X model and a spatial Durbin error model.

The research focuses in particular on Measure 5 on “Restoring agricultural production potential damaged by natural disasters and catastrophic events and introduction of appropriate prevention actions” and Measure 17 on “Risk management” of the CAP’s Rural Development policy.

Results suggest that there is a strong spatial dependence in the level of RMT expenditure. Higher expenditure towards RMT occurs in regions more exposed to environmental risks, with more land in mountainous and disadvantaged areas and with more arable, pasture and forest land. The expenditure on financial contributions for investments to restore agricultural production damaged by natural disasters is lower in agricultural intensive regions but higher in rich regions where pasture land is predominant. The expenditure for supporting insurance premiums and mutual funds is lower
when the incidence of environmental risks increases and when land use is highly diversified but is higher in richer regions. Our results provide relevant insights for policymakers in the process of developing the future risk management tools of the new CAP post-2020.

Click here and have a look at the report!

Authors:

Mauro Vigani, Amr Khafagy, Robert Berry

Corresponding author:

Mauro Vigani: mvigani@glos.ac.uk

We are happy to announce that the new special issue on European Farming Systems’ resilience is already published!

You can find multiple suggestions to enhance resilience:

1.- The Struggle of Farming Systems in Europe: Looking for Explanations through the Lens of Resilience

Miranda P.M. Meuwissen, Peter H. Feindt, Peter Midmore, Erwin Wauters, Robert Finger, Franziska Appel, Alisa Spiegel, Erik Mathijs, Katrien J.A.M. Termeer, Alfons Balmann, Yann de Mey, Pytrik Reidsma

2.- Telling Stories – Farmers Offer New Insights into Farming Resilience

Phillipa Nicholas‐Davies, Susan Fowler, Peter Midmore

3.-How do Stakeholders Perceive the Sustainability and Resilience of EU Farming Systems?

Pytrik Reidsma, Miranda Meuwissen, Francesco Accatino, Franziska Appel, Isabel Bardaji, Isabeau Coopmans, Camelia Gavrilescu, Florian Heinrich, Vitaliy Krupin, Gordana Manevska‐Tasevska, Mariya Peneva, Jens Rommel, Simone Severini, Bárbara Soriano, Julie Urquhart, Katarzyna Zawalińska, Wim Paas

4.-Resilience, Labour and Migration Trends in the EU‐27

Thomas Slijper

5.-Policy directions to support generational renewal in European farming systems

Isabeau Coopmans, Joost Dessein, Francesco Accatino, Federico Antonioli, Camelia Gavrilescu, Piotr Gradziuk, Gordana Manevska‐Tasevska, Miranda Meuwissen, Mariya Peneva, Bárbara Soriano, Julie Urquhart, Erwin Wauters

6.-How Much Farm Succession is Needed to Ensure Resilience of Farming Systems?

Christine Pitson, Jo Bijttebier, Franziska Appel, Alfons Balmann

7.-Risk Management and its Role in Enhancing Perceived Resilience Capacities of Farms and Farming Systems in Europe

Alisa Spiegel, Bárbara Soriano, Yann de Mey, Thomas Slijper, Julie Urquhart, Isabel Bardají, Mauro Vigani, Simone Severini, Miranda Meuwissen

8.-Insuring Weather Risks in European Agriculture

Willemijn Vroege, Robert Finger

9.-Improving the Resilience‐enabling Capacity of the Common Agricultural Policy: Policy Recommendations for More Resilient EU Farming Systems

Yannick Buitenhuis, Jeroen Candel, Peter H. Feindt, Katrien Termeer, Erik Mathijs, Isabel Bardají, Jasmine Black, Anna Martikainen, Mertijn Moeyersons, Alessandro Sorrentino

10.-Making Farming Systems Truly Resilient

Erik Mathijs, Erwin Wauters

Dr. Miranda Meuwissen, Professor of risk management in food supply chains, Business Economics Group at Wageningen University & Research and coordinator of FURE-Farm, explains how to build resilience of European farming systems.

She explains that improving farming systems resilience is complex. It requires a regional approach and there is no one solution that fits all farming systems across Europe. But in SURE-Farm we are proud that we managed to come up with priorities.

Have a look at the video

A new report is now available! It assesses the impacts of improved strategies and policy options on the resilience of farming systems across the EU.

SURE-Farm researchers used insights from a participatory assessment (FoPIA‐SURE‐Farm 1 and 2) executed in in 11 EU farming systems to identify strategies that enhance sustainability and resilience of these farming systems. This participatory assessment was complemented by an expert assessment and system dynamics (SD) modelling, to improve understanding of dynamic processes influencing sustainability and resilience of farming systems, and the conditions that enable such processes.

The main aim of this report is to identify past and optional future strategies in farming systems across the EU, to assess how these contribute to the delivery of private and public goods and resilience‐enhancing attributes, and to identify additional interventions needed by farming system actors and the enabling environment.

Have a look at the full report! Download

Reidsma, P., W. Paas, F. Accatino, F. Appel, J. Black, J. Bijttebier, C. Gavrilescu, B. Kopainsky, V. Krupin, G. Manevska Tasevska, M. Meuwissen, F. Ollendorf, M. Peneva, S. Senni, S. Severini, B. Soriano, J. Urquhart, M. Vigani, K. Zawalinska, C. Zinnanti, H. Herrera, 2020. D5.6 Impacts of improved strategies and policy options on the resilience of farming systems across the EU. Sustainable and resilient EU farming systems (SURE‐Farm) project report, EU Horizon 2020
Grant Agreement No. 727520.

Author’s contact: pytrik.reidsma@wur.nl

Read the new paper written by Martina Bozzola and Robert Finger about the farmers’ risk attitude.  This article investigates the stability of farmers’ risk attitude over time. The authors find evidence of risk preference changes over time in response to changes in the European Union Common Agricultural Policy and possibly after a drought-induced production shock.

Click here and read the paper!

Reference:

Bozzola, M., & Finger, R. (2020). Stability of risk attitude, agricultural policies and production shocks: evidence from Italy. European Review of Agricultural Economics.

We are glad to announce that SURE-Farm researchers participated in the definition of the Shared Socio-economic Pathways for European agriculture and food systems: The Eur-Agri-SSPs.

The authors followed a nine-step protocol to extend and enrich a set of global scenarios – the Shared Socio-economic Pathways (SSPs) – providing regional and sectoral detail for European agriculture and food systems using a one-to-one nesting participatory approach.

Compared to the global SSPs, the Eur-Agri-SSPs provide rich thematic and regional details and are thus a solid basis for integrated assessments of agriculture and food systems and their response to future socio-economic and environmental changes.

Click here to read the paper

Reference:

Mitter, H., Techen, A. K., Sinabell, F., Helming, K., Schmid, E., Bodirsky, B. L., … & Le Mouël, C. (2020). Shared Socio-economic Pathways for European agriculture and food systems: The Eur-Agri-SSPs. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102159. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.

A new paper on weather insurance is released!

Looking for better insurance solutions to cope with drought risks, the authors design a weather index insurance using drought indices based on precipitation, soil moisture and evapotranspiration as underlying drought index and compare their risk-reducing potential for winter wheat producers in Eastern Germany.

Click here to download the paper.

Reference:

Bucheli, J., Dalhaus, T., Finger, R (2020). The optimal drought index for designing weather index insurance, European Review of Agricultural Economics, pp 1-15, doi:10.1093/erae/jbaa014

The VII SURE-Farm consortium meeting was held the 7th-9th September. As the previous one, it was an online consortium meeting.

Several issues were discussed in the meeting such as the definition of the resilience enabling environment and the implementation roadmaps, the identification of the strategies to enhance resilience and the system dynamics assessment by applying the Causal Loop Diagrams (CLD).

SURE-Farm partners were also able to participate in online social events, thanks to @gather.town.