Organic farming practices have environmental benefits compared to conventional ones. Their adoption is the result of a complex interaction of intrinsic attitudes of farmers, their profit expectations and farm policy incentives. We use an agricultural sector model and develop an extended version...

Direct payments are the most important expenditure of the Common Agricultural Policy. They are mostly in the form of decoupled direct payments which are intended to be allocatively neutral. Increasing volumes of such transfers imply that distributive aspects of CAP expenditures become more...

Fears about food security in the EU have become a driving force in the debate about the future Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). But the facts do not bear out these fears. This paper brings together the available evidence against EU food security concerns: the size of EU production, the even...

CAP reform is the major bone of contention in the negotiations of the next long-term EU budget beyond 2013. This paper reviews the political landscape so as to make it more legible to the public. First, it summarizes the arguments concerning key reform issues: What should be the size of the CAP...

Changes in global food prices have affected EU producers and consumers and have triggered policy reactions through the EU's political process. In particular, the EU and member states responded by social policies to protect their consumers, attempts to regulate 'speculation' on agricultural...

The aim of this paper is to provide a review of policy instruments aimed at controlling pollution from agricultural diffuse sources, and compare their pros and cons. The review also includes a description of instruments introduced through recent reforms of the European Common Agricultural Policy...

This article analyses how credit market imperfections affect the impacts of subsidies by analyzing the effects of agricultural subsidies in the new Eastern Member States of the European Union with a partial equilibrium model which integrates credit and land market imperfections. We show that...