133th EAAE Seminar

The agricultural sector in the EU is currently facing an era of change and farmers need to adapt to the changing patterns induced by the food crisis, the global financial crisis, farm output price volatility, macroeconomic instability, climate change and a new post-2013 CAP. Throughout this unstable period, the impact of these changes on farmersˇ incomes will be a key issue to be addressed by EU policy makers, thereby stressing the need for new comprehensive analytical tools, well-adapted to the Commissions informatics environment and well-suited to reliably assessing the effects of the anticipated changes. Since the recent radical reform of the CAP, markets have been extremely volatile, while farmers are becoming more exposed to risk as they have to cope with a deregulated and increasingly liberalized and competitive world market, and are nowadays attempting to adjust to this new environment. In parallel, these new market and policy conditions will certainly have an effect on the use of natural resources and hence on the environmental concerns of farming activities. It is generally anticipated that agricultural and food prices will remain quite volatile in the years ahead, posing a major challenge both for producers, with respect to having to operate under increased uncertainty, as well as for EU policy makers, who must effectively monitor the changing environment and its effects on farmers behavior and performance, so as to fittingly adopt the policy measures.