Modelling of the Common Agricultural Policies post 2027

Background and Objective

The Common Agricultural Policy is the European Union's flagship policy for supporting the agricultural sector, ensuring food security and safeguarding rural development. Further, it is also a key tool for reaching the objectives of the European Green Deal, including the Farm to Fork and the Biodiversity Strategy. With these policy strategies, the EU aims for more sustainable food systems. Effectively supporting the policy impact assessment in this new context is a great challenge for the existing quantitative modelling tools as it requires them to substantially enhance the thematic coverage to comprehensively address all the components of the European Green Deal and ensure consistency with the monitoring systems in place.

This project responds to this challenge by enhancing the analytical capacity of the key policy tools (CAPRI, GLOBIOM, MAGNET, AGMEMOD) used by the European Commission to assess short-term to long-term policy impacts on EU’s agri-food systems and providing evidence-based knowledge supporting analysis for the design of agri-food policies post-2027.

We want to develop a consistent, interdisciplinary methodological framework to operationalise and quantify relevant aspects of the EU agri-food system and related policies post-2027 and their economic, social (including health), environmental, and climate sustainability impacts.

We will address the main shortcomings of current modelling tools and develop a modular toolbox for EU food system modelling. This toolbox will provide a basis for innovation by creating a collaborative space and a modular model infrastructure for the whole EU agri-food research community and beyond.

Approach

In the project, multiple databases and modules will be developed to fit one or more of the four models CAPRI, GLOBIOM, MAGNET, and AGMEMOD. Further, these will be made publicly accessible via a platform built by our project partner IIASA.

At the Thünen Institute of Market Analysis, we will build a database containing the CAP policies and other relevant policies for the agricultural sector. This database will be the basis for building a module for AGMEMOD. Afterwards, this module can also be implemented in CAPRI, GLOBIOM, and MAGNET. This module will enable the policy assessment tools to simulate policy changes in a consistent, standardized, and harmonized way.

At the Thünen Institute of Farm Economics, we will develop an extension for the existing models that allows us to model human demand for food and consumer behavior in more detail. In the status quo, human demand is modelled regarding raw primary products. In contrast, the extension will deal with the consumption of processed foods and dishes and utilize data from food intake surveys. This tool will allow us to examine in more detail what diet transformation can look like on people’s plates and which policy instruments could be used to effectively achieve this.

The Thünen Institute of Farm Economics will lead the Work Package 6, aiming to construct an effective, interconnected, and integrated quantitative policy assessment for the CAP post-2027, utilizing the enhanced modeling infrastructure developed within the project. Specifically, the project team will establish common short- to long-term baselines for all participating models to serve as benchmarks for policy evaluation. The quantitative assessment of future EU agri-food policies will proceed in two stages: a fast-track assessment and a final-track assessment. The fast-track assessment will utilize existing models without enhancements to analyze pivotal and timely issues within the initial two years of the project. This step will highlight the shortcomings of the existing models which will be addressed throughout the project. Conversely, the final track assessment will implement all new model developments to produce an interactive roadmap for transitioning to a sustainable European food system.

Links and Downloads

Official homepage

Project in CORDIS