Over the past two decades, the European Union (EU) internal market policies in general, and the ones related to agriculture and the common agricultural policies in particular, have observed substantial changes. These include a move from direct production-related payments towards payments linked with environmental performance and rural development. The EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is organized under two pillars, including cross-cutting issues. The first pillar includes the direct payments and market measures, and the second pillar includes the rural development policy. Rural development policy has become evermore important.
The increase in horizontal and vertical integration in the agriculture and food sector, the increase in intra-industry trade and the globalisation of trade but also in norms and values have linked the agricultural sector more strongly with the food sector. Further, technical change has increased the portfolio for processing biomass not only into food and feed but also into a number of alternative bio-based products including bioenergy, biopolymers and more (European Commission 2012). The development of bio-based industries provides new opportunities for agriculture and rural communities (Wesseler and von Braun 2017). Environmental concerns and climate change in particular have increased the demand for sustainable development-related policies as indicated in the circular economy (European Commission 2015) and bioeconomy strategy (European Commission 2018) documents.
As a result of these developments, assessing the agricultural sector and related policies in isolation may result in substantial biases from a technical change, a regional (Heijman et al. 2017), an organisational (Pascucci et al. 2015) as well as a legal perspective (Purnhagen 2013). One of the most striking examples is perhaps the debate about new developments in plant breeding. It has often been argued that the stringent regulatory policies on the approval of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) can be justified by concerns of EU consumers towards the technology, but that this will not have further implications for other sectors such as medicine. This argument falls short of the insight that such kind of policy is very likely to spill over to other sectors of the economy as well. Take patent applications for the gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas that can be applied across several sectors as an example: The EU has only a share of about 7% of all patents, while the USA and China have a share of more than 40% according to a recent study (Martin-Laffon et al. 2019).1 The shares for the medical sector are even lower, only about 3.5%, while for the agricultural sector they are about 8%. The results suggest that EU policies on GMOs can have substantial, in this case negative, spill-over effects on other sectors. The example further illustrates the complexity of EU bioeconomy policies.
Within the two volumes, we attempt to make a contribution to better understanding the complexity of EU bioeconomy policies. As mentioned above agricultural policies in the EU should not be assessed in isolation. We have given the book the name EU Bioeconomy Economics and Policies to explicitly stipulate the importance of the interconnectedness of the agricultural sector and related policies with up- and downstream sectors.
The book is a follow-up on two earlier books on “EU policy for agriculture, food and rural areas” edited by Arie Oskam, Gerrit Meester and Huib Silvis (Oskam et al. 2011). This new edition has maintained some of the structure of the previous ones but has been largely revised and partly written afresh. Additional chapters on the EU bioeconomy and circular economy policies as well as on bioenergy policies have been added. The part on rural areas has been expanded by including tourism.
In general, the chapters are short and descriptive in nature to provide the reader with information about the current state of policies and underlying motivations. We believe this is an important part of applied policy analysis where a researcher needs to first get a basis of understanding of the state of the art of the current situation before moving into policy analysis and conclusions for policy recommendations.
While the chapters are rather policy descriptive, we have included two theory-oriented chapters. The first one, Chap. 2, stresses important aspects of applied policy analysis derived from economic theory and the second one, Chap. 7, volume 2 focuses on the economic theory of public goods, an important characteristic of rural amenities.
The two volumes are organized in six parts. Each part concentrates on specific policy areas except for Part I, which includes this introduction and the chapter on the economic theory of bioeconomy policies. Part II covers the institutional framework of the European Union. Part III covers agricultural policies, Part IV food policies, Part V rural policies and Part VI circular bioeconomy policies. Each part includes a chapter on the future developments derived from the individual chapters to provide the reader with some ideas about what to expect. Naturally, there are some overlaps between the different chapters caused by interlinkages of topics and policies.
References
- Doudna, J., and S. Sternberg. 2017. A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
- European Commission. 2012. Innovating for Sustainable Growth. A Bioeconomy for Europe. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
- ———. 2015. Closing the Loop—An EU Action Plan for the Circular Economy. COM (2015) 614 final. Brussels.
- ———. 2018. A Sustainable Bioeconomy for Europe: Strengthening the Connection Between Economy, Society and the Environment. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union.
- Heijman, W., J. Klijs, J. Peerlings, J. Rouwendal, and R.A. Schipper. 2017. Space and Economics: An Introduction to Regional Economics. Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers.Crossref
- Martin-Laffon, J., M. Kuntz, and A.E. Ricroch. 2019. Worldwide CRISPR Patent Landscape Shows Strong Geographical Biases. Nature Biotechnology 37: 601–621.Crossref
- Oskam, A., G. Meesters, and H. Silvis, eds. 2011. EU Policy for Agriculture, Food and Rural Areas. 2nd ed. Wageningen: Wageningen Academic Publishers.
- Pascucci, S., L. Dries, K. Karantininis, and G. Martino. 2015. Regulation and Organizational Change in the Governance of Agri-Food Value Chains. British Food Journal 117 (10). https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-07-2015-0268.
- Purnhagen, K. 2013. The Politics of Systematiz...