Farming worldwide and national agricultural policies are in a profound crisis. Farmers everywhere are complaining about inadequate incomes. A large proportion of farms are threatened on both sides of the Atlantic, in the EC no less than in the USA. This situation has coincided with a period of...

Many international organisations, including the European Parliament, see reducing food loss and waste as a priority. They argue that this will increase the efficiency of resource use and have beneficial environmental effects. This paper asserts that the scale of the problem has been overstated...

Der Erfolg einer Politik wird häufig mit dem Umfang der eingesetzten Finanzmittel gleichgesetzt. Die Autoren dieses Beitrag halten eine solche Einschätzung für verfehlt. Vielmehr sollten die Kosten dem Nutzen gegenübergestellt und einzelne Instrumente nicht mit unterschiedlichen Zielen...

Direct payments were originally justified as a mechanism to compensate farmers for the income loss incurred due to reduced intervention prices. However, this rationale is not valid any more, and a new justification for basic income support by granting basic decoupled direct payments has been...