5748: Aufbau eines sektor-konsistenten Betriebsgruppenmodells zur Politikfolgenabschätzung für den biologischen Landbau [Development of a sector-consistent farm group model for policy impact analyses for organic farming ]

{PROJECT} CH-FARMIS: Aufbau eines sektor-konsistenten Betriebsgruppenmodells zur Politikfolgenabschätzung für den biologischen Landbau [Development of a sector-consistent farm group model for policy impact analyses for organic farming ]. Runs 01 January 2003 - 31 December 2005. Project leader(s): Sanders, Jürn, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), CH-5070 Frick. More information online at <http://www.fibl.org/forschung/sozio-oekonomie/agrarpolitik/politikfolgen.php>.

Summary

Definition of the problem:
Organic farming experienced a considerable expansion in Europe in the last decade. From 1993 to 2001, average annual growth rate were 26% for the EU-15 (Hamm and Gronefeld, 2004). In the whole of Europe, in 2004, almost 6.3 million hectares were managed organically by approximately 170,000 farmers (Willer and Richter, 2005). The most important factors for the past growth were a growing demand for organic food and direct payments for organic management practices. While both factors remain important in the future, it is expected that the further development of organic farming is predominantly determined by the general policy environment of the farming sector in Europe (see Häring et al., 2004). The impact of policy measures on agriculture is commonly analysed by employing quantitative models. Until today, however, only a few models were developed that take organic farming explicitly into consideration (e.g. Häring, 2003; Offermann, 2003; Richter et al., 2001; Hartnagel et al., 2000) and the existing ones are for various reasons less suited to be used in practice as a policy assessment tool.
Project aims:
In the light of the enormous impact of agricultural policy on the further development of organic farming and the lack of suitable impact analysis tools the aim of this project is to develop a quantitative policy impact model for organic farming.
Methodology:
For the development of a Swiss policy impact model for organic farming the modelling framework of the German model FARMIS will be used. Originally developed for the German agricultural sector, FARMIS has recently been extended to cover although other EU member states (Offermann et al., 2005). For Switzerland, FARMIS will adopted to the specific Swiss policy environment and advanced by a farming-system differentiated representation of the agricultural sector.
The model is a comparative-static process-analytical non-linear programming model that represents the Swiss agricultural sector. Following other sector programming models, CH-FARMIS is divided into four modular units. The data unit comprises all data that are needed to construct the model. The data processing unit includes all steps to derive complete input-output tables for each farm model, to determine the forward projection of ex-ante variables and to generate the weighting factors for the aggregation procedure. The optimisation unit comprises all individual farm models that are used to optimise the factor allocation and the production programme of farms and farm groups, respectively for a baseline and various alternative scenarios. Finally, the output unit comprises the presentation and analysis of the optimisation procedure.

Additional Summary

Involved organisations, project partners: Bundesforschungsanstalt für Landwirtschaft (FAL), Braunschweig

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