Significance of Agriculture for Bioeconomy in the Member States of the European Union

Bioeconomy is a response of the European Union and its member states to global challenges such as ensuring food security, mandatory sustainable management of natural resources, mitigating climate change and reducing dependency on non-renewable resources. One of the sectors playing an important role in the development of bioeconomy is agriculture, which accounts for the largest part of biomass used as a raw material for producing bioproducts. This paper is an attempt to answer the following questions: What is the essence and significance of the bioeconomy sector in the EU? How significant is agriculture to the bioeconomy sector? What is the potential and competitiveness of agriculture in EU countries? Data used in surveys is sourced from the Data-Modelling platform of agro-economics research and covers the years 2008–2017. The position of agriculture in the bioeconomy was determined based on measures such as level of employment and gross value added (GVA), turnover, while its competitiveness was assessed based on labour productivity. The results of surveys showed that more than 50% of all bioeconomy workers were employed in agriculture. The sector produced nearly 30% GVA and had a more than 18% share in bioeconomy turnover. Member states of the European Union featured diverse agricultural potential. At the same time, the productivity of agriculture was one of the lowest in the bioeconomy sector. The importance of agriculture stems not only from its food function, but also from the production of biomass. However, its social function is equally important, and in the face of escalating environmental problems the function connected with reducing external costs and producing environmental public goods has become complementary.

Quality of Government and Environmental Sustainability

Previous research on the relationship between quality of government (QoG) and environmental sustainability is scant, scattered across different disciplines, and is characterized by a disconnect between studies focusing on the effects of QoG on the micro level (individual behavior) and micro level (country policies and actions). The chapter synthesizes the different literatures on the connection between various elements of QoG, such as low levels of corruption, bureaucratic capacity, and rule of law, on the one hand, and environmental sustainability on the other hand. On the macro level, it theorizes the role of QoG in securing governments’ production of environmental public goods. On the micro level, the chapter discusses how QoG can shape cooperation in collective action dilemmas over natural resource use, as well as how it contributes to generating public support of and compliance with environmental policies.

Organic Farming Support Policy in a Sustainable Development Context: A Polish Case Study

This paper assesses the extent, scope and importance of financial support for Polish organic farming from 2004 to 2019. The analysis focuses particularly on how the changes in the amount and structure of organic farming payments affected farmers’ interest in specific organic crops during three financing periods: the 2004–2006 Rural Development Plan, the 2007–2013 Rural Development Programme (RDP) and the 2014–2020 Rural Development Programme. This paper aims to answer the question of whether and to what extent the organic farming support policy impacted the development trends followed by, and transformation processes affecting, this sector. It follows from this analysis that in the first decade after joining the European Union, Poland implemented a policy of making payments easily available. It was primarily focused on the quantitative growth of organic farming rather than on stimulating supply. As the payments were easily accessible and decoupled from production, subsidy-oriented farmers were additionally encouraged to seek political rent. This resulted in the instability of a large group of farms who discontinued their organic farming activity in 2014. That year, the policy was amended because of the need to improve the allocation efficiency of subsidies and to couple them with the provision not only of environmental public goods but also of private goods in the form of organic farming products. The current support policy opens up greater opportunities for leveraging the potential of organic farming while reaping environmental and socioeconomic benefits and contributing more than ever to sustainable development.

Environmental Public Goods

Chapter 8 considers the conservation of environmental public goods. The nonexclusive and nonrival nature of public goods provide an incentive to free-ride on the efforts of others. The result is that such public goods are systematically undervalued and the underlying environmental assets—such as watersheds, habitats, and ecological communities—are underconserved. It shows how individuals determine their contribution to public goods (via a Nash-Cournot reaction curve), and compares the result to the contribution that would be made if resources were being allocated efficiently from the perspective of society. Types of environmental public goods considered include additive (climate change), best- and better-shot (defence), weakest- and weaker-link (infectious disease control), and local public goods (common pool resources). The chapter also shows how strategic behavior by the beneficiaries of public goods may lead to socially undesirable outcomes (such as prisoner’s dilemmas).

Commoning of territorial heritage and tools of participated sustainability for the production and enhancement of agro-environmental public goods

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the commoning heritage processes find application for the production of agro-environmental public goods in contexts of high socio-economic marginality and environmental vulnerability, characterized by abandonment and from the consumption of agricultural land for food use. The purpose is to understand how these processes are able to influence, at local level, the governance processes for the implementation of environmental protection strategies. The survey made it possible to verify how the commoning processes aimed at the production of agro-environmental goods generate territorial resilience, understood as a community competence able to structure specific forms of social learning based on priorities identified and defined by the communities. The followed theoretical framework and the methodological approach have allowed on the one hand to draw up a taxonomy of the different territorial dynamics and on the other to identify a mixed indicator system, applicable and replicable also in other contexts, able to describe its dimensions analytically. The assessment of the cognitive elements related to the territorial fabric carried out through the proposed approach has allowed to demonstrate how the knowledge of the territorial capital contributes to the activation of forms of collective intelligence necessary for decision-making processes.

¿Resultaría económicamente eficiente un programa de reconversión ecológica para el olivar de montaña andaluz?

This paper analyses the efficiency of a possible agri-environmental scheme aimed at promoting the partial or complete abandonment of the agricultural production in mountain olive groves in Andalusia in order to enhance the provision of environmental public goods (biodiversity and soil functionality). The results obtained show that this scheme would generate positive net social gains (public benefits greater than social costs) only if the scheme is focused on low-yield olive farms and includes low to moderate payments (125 and 500 €/ha·year for partial and total abandonment, respectively).