In 2015, all 193 UN member countries agreed to halve global food losses and waste by the year 2030. In this article, we are going to explore why the first official study on food loss and waste (FLW) by Gustavsson et al. FAO, 2011 cannot be used as a reasonable basis for policymaking – even...

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...

Der Präsident des Europäischen Parlaments, Martin Schulz, hat wiederholt betont, dass kleine und mittelständische Unternehmen nur begrenzten Zugang zu Krediten haben. Eine Förderung dieser Unternehmen sei daher sinnvoll, um die Arbeitslosigkeit zu verringern. Laut Presseberichten erwägt...

For quite some time long-only index funds have been suspected of being responsible for price increases in agricultural futures markets. This suspicion has prompted demands to drastically limit long-only index funds' scope of activity. Such demands and their underlying diagnoses, however,...

The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, has repeatedly pointed out that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in some southern European countries face major constraints to access to credit and that removing these constraints for SMEs could contribute to reducing...

Seit dem 1. Februar 2015 werden russische Weizenexporte zusätzlich besteuert, um die jüngst stark angestiegenen Weizenexporte zu reduzieren. Ziel ist es, dem weiteren Ansteigen der bereits hohen inländischen Weizenpreise entgegenzuwirken und die Brotpreise zu stabilisieren. Erfahrungen der...

The EU has signed new agreements with Ukraine, Moldavia, and Ukraine, the so-called Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA). This policy brief only focuses on Georgia to exemplify the mythology and some important specifics of the participating countries that differ somewhat, but are...

Die EU hat neue Abkommen mit der Ukraine, Moldawien und Georgien in Form der sogenannten Vertieften und Umfassenden Freihandelszone (DCFTA) unterzeichnet. Dieser Policy Brief konzentriert sich nur auf Georgien, um die zugrundeliegenden Annahmen bei der Wirkungsanalyse zu veranschaulichen. Da das...

This is a comment on the article by West et al. (2014) on “Leverage points for improving global food security and the environment”. The authors claim that the leverage points they have identified “offer the best opportunities to improve both global food security and environmental...

The Russian government implemented a wheat export tax in February 2015 to reduce food inflationary pressures resulting from the rouble's dramatic devaluation. This article discusses the causes of the rouble's instability and volatility, and the effects of the export controls on domestic wheat...