Bioeconomy, The

Delivering Sustainable Green Growth

Davide Viaggi

• Editorial: CAB International
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786392770
• Categoría: Ciencias biológicas
• Categoría: Biotecnología

The 'bioeconomy' is the idea of an economy based on the sustainable exploitation of biological resources. Within this concept, there is increasing emphasis on issues such as climate change, depletion of natural resources and growing world food needs. The bioeconomy builds on the recognition of advances in technology, particularly in the life sciences, but at the same time covers issues such as innovation management, ecosystem services, development and governance. This book explores the development of the bioeconomy across the world from an economic and policy perspective, as well as identifying potential future pathways and issues. It uses a broad definition, covering all sectors using biological resources except health, and rather than focusing on individual sectors, it explores the breadth of interconnections that make the bioeconomy a new and challenging subject. Divided into two parts, the book initially outlines the current definitions, strategies, policy and economic information related to the world's bioeconomy. The second part describes current economic analysis and research efforts in qualifying and understanding the economics of the bioeconomy. This includes the contributions of technology, research and innovation; driving forces and demand-side economics; supply-side economics, and the role of markets and public policy in matching demand and supply. The political economy, regulation and transitions are considered, as well as the contribution of the bioeconomy to society, including growth, development and sustainability.Key features include: - An analysis of varied international approaches to the bioeconomy.- A joint consideration of biotechnology, agriculture, food energy and bio-materials.- An assessment of sustainability in the bioeconomy.- A comprehensive view of the issues from an economic and policy perspective.This book will be of interest to students and researchers in agricultural and natural resource economics, agricultural and environmental policy, as well as policy-makers, practitioners and economists.

1
Introduction and Overview

1.1 Introducing the Bioeconomy

This chapter introduces the concept of ‘bioeconomy’ and provides the motivation for this book. The scope and the rationale of the book are also presented, together with an overview.

The general concept of the bioeconomy is that of an economy based on the sustainable exploitation of biological resources. There are, however, differing views on this general definition. For example, the European Union (EU) defines it as a bundle of sectors including agriculture and food. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and United States definitions, for their part, are more focused on biotechnology. Following different country definitions and strategies, there is a latent divergence between two notions of bioeconomy: one that basically uses the term as the non-food component of the economy, linked to biological resources, and another that also includes agriculture and food. Policy trends in the EU and worldwide seem to legitimize the second option, and this is the approach followed in this book.

The existence of different views is also linked to the use of the term bioeconomy in various branches of research, with different normative visions of technology. In spite of this diversity, a common feature of the existing visions of the bioeconomy, together with the foundation in biological resources, is the central role of knowledge, research and innovation, as well as the growing attention to circularity and sustainability, in particular linked to climate change concerns.

Indeed, the policy context is characterized by growing concerns for climate change, scarcity of fossil resources and growing world food needs. In parallel, there is growing recognition of the advances in technology, especially in the life sciences. The bioeconomy is envisaged as a potential transition pathway to address (at least some of) these problems, meeting society needs while respecting the world’s ecosystems and natural resources.

The importance of the bioeconomy has grown considerably in policy agendas around the world. Around 50 countries now have policy agendas impacting directly on the bioeconomy. The G7 countries are becoming leaders in this strategy. Germany, the USA and Japan have produced the most ambitious bioeconomy strategies; the EU has taken a leading promotional role through its bioeconomy strategy and Horizon 2020 research framework programme (European Commission, 2012; German Bioeconomy Council, 2015a; 2015b). Most EU countries now have national strategies on issues related to the bioeconomy, and 18 out of 28 have included the bioeconomy as a priority for EU structural funds. This pathway has been marked by a number of major funding initiatives and by several major events. A recent update about country bioeconomy strategies and international initiatives on the bioeconomy has been published by the German Bioeconomy Council (2018).

Steps have been made to better qualify the bioeconomy and its policy approach, with a growing emphasis on sustainability and the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (El-Chichakli et al., 2016; Viaggi, 2016).

Another important aspect is that bioeconomy strategies are increasingly embedded in other policies, such as the EU Common Agricultural Policy, which also include measures to facilitate the supply of renewable sources of energy, by-products, wastes and residues for the bioeconomy (Viaggi, 2016). Another example concerns the integration between the bioeconomy and the circular economic strategies. For example, in the EU communication on the circular economy, the bioeconomy is expected to contribute to the circular economy, especially by providing alternatives to fossil-based products and energy. The communication includes sections on food waste, biomass and bio-based products (European Commission, 2015).

The development of the bioeconomy in different areas of the world highlights some common needs, but also shows different approaches and competing interests. In some cases the bioeconomy focuses on the exploitation of local biological resources, in others on industrial or technological progress; some countries have a strong attention to rural development (El-Chichakli et al., 2016). The global interconnection of markets is growing and the effects of specific bioeconomy policies transmit much faster than in the past from one region of the world to another.

In the 2017 OECD report on the ‘next production revolution’, the bioeconomy is listed as one of the key sectors for technology advances (OECD, 2017) and several bioeconomy-related policy priorities are listed as being key for the future. In this sense the bioeconomy is expected to contribute to the ongoing major technology shift that will likely lead to a new technological revolution, together with other areas of technological change such as nanotechnologies and digitalization.

Indeed, much of the potential of the bioeconomy is still largely untapped, as bioeconomy technology is characterized by continuous innovation as well as more and more reactive markets and social structures. In this promising and quickly evolving sector, the interface between myth and reality, between socially constructed and actual impacts, as well as between ‘industrial legends’ and promising technologies is also often difficult to grasp.

1.2 Bioeconomy in Economic Research

This book is based on the idea that, in this context, economic research has an important and somewhat unique role to play. Research is devoting growing attention to the bioeconomy. This should not come as a surprise, as the bioeconomy is largely relying on research and innovation. However, the vast majority of the existing research examines individual components of the bioeconomy, rather than the bioeconomy as a whole and, in fact, only a small portion of the bioeconomy-related research specifically mentions the term ‘bioeconomy’.

A search of the term ‘Bioeconomy’ in the Scopus database (based on title, abstract and keywords of papers) in December 2017 yielded 878 papers, with a growing trend in recent years (confirmed by additional 185 papers in the first half of 2018). Of these, 172 were classified in the category ‘Social sciences’ and 89 as ‘Economics, econometrics and finance’. Eighty-six were in ‘Business, management and accounting’. The most frequent references were the 228 papers in ‘Biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology’, the 225 papers in ‘Environmental science’ and the 217 papers in ‘Agricultural and biological sciences’.

Though several papers date back to the 1990s, the number of contributions has begun to grow only recently. Moreover, there is a clear trend from very specific papers, e.g. in life sciences, which make mention of bioeconomy (with a plethora of meanings at the beginning) towards more comprehensive attempts to deal with the bioeconomy as a distinct concept or sector. Only since 2015–2016, however, has there been a clear prevalence of papers with a shared view of the bioeconomy as a comprehensive subject and that tend to identify their specific contribution in this overall concept.

Considering the bioeconomy-related papers in the subject area ‘Economics, econometrics and finance’ only, the number of papers per year has been (irregularly) growing over the past five years: 11 in 2012, 9 in 2013, 4 in 2014, 16 in 2015, 15 in 2016, and 22 in 2017. This also highlights that papers in economics tend to appear in the literature later than those in both the biological sciences and social sciences (the latter recording a noteworthy number of papers as early as in the period 2004–2006).

It is noteworthy that special issues have been devoted to the bioeconomy in at least two major journals dedicated to agriculture and food economics (Agricultural Economics and the German Journal of Agricultural Economics); at least one journal is entirely dedicated to bioeconomy-focused works (AgBioForum) and another has bioeconomy as one of its distinctive features (Bio-based and Applied Economics). There is also a journal called Bioeconomics that mostly showcases interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of biological resource management. The journal New Biotechnology dedicated a special issue to the bioeconomy issues in 2017 with a number of economic and technology-related papers (Aguilar et al., 2018). As the subject is taking shape, some relevant books are addressing the bioeconomy with a strong or prevailing economic/social sciences perspective (Bonaccorso, 2016; Lewandowski, 2018).

Much of the bioeconomy-related economic literature is focused on the individual building blocks of the bioeconomy. Indeed, some sectors, such as agriculture and food, have been extensively studied and have a much longer history than the bioeconomy itself. Some insights into these sectors’ trends can be seen from publication numbers. Economics papers related to ‘agriculture’ now number 13,324 in Scopus and have grown constantly from 174 per year in 2000 to 865 in 2017. This is even more evident for economics papers related to ‘food’, now totalling 17,265 papers in Scopus, having grown from 232 in 2000 to 1445 in 2017. Clearly, these sectors are still attracting a good deal of attention and have even become more attractive topics for research in very recent years.

More specific aspects of the bioeconomy are also the subject of a growing research effort, such as bioenergy, biorefinery and biotechnologies. Economics papers indexed in Scopus now number 1658 for the ‘biotechnology’ keyword (with a growing trend and average of more than 100 per year in the period 2011–2013, but decreasing afterwards) and 314 for ‘bioenergy’ (with similar trends, though having started much later, and a production of about 30–40 papers per year in recent years). Biorefinery, for its part, only counts 65 economics papers, with a top production of 10 in 2011 and subsequent ups and downs. One of the most interesting components of this group, involving newly emerging products such as ‘biomaterials’, still only counts 22 papers in economics (compared with more than 187 in business and tens of thousands altogether).

Investigating this large bulk of literature is beyond the scope and ambition of this book. The focus is rather on the various components of this literature that point to the bioeconomy as a whole and which relate to the bioeconomy as a new concept. At the same time, some aspects of these more traditional sectors need to be considered, not only because they can be fully considered as part of the definition of bioeconomy (see the next chapters), but also because many emerging sectors are indeed largely connected to the oldest sectors (notably biorefinery or bioenergy and agriculture).

The term bioeconomy is also being integrated into the existing fields of research. Foguesatto et al. (2017) provide the example of bioeconomy references in agribusiness papers between the years 2000 and 2015. They found 75 papers and note the progression of publications in this ‘interfacing’ field, pointing to the high level of interdisciplinarity (as well as to the frequent examples of terminology confusion).

It is common for fields of study at their inception to build a lot on descriptive approaches. A number of studies address the issue of the bioeconomy by describing and analysing case studies of bioeconomy development. These may be related to specific policies, country strategies (e.g. Kamal and Che Dir, 2015), or to specific plants (e.g. Schieb et al., 2015). However, the understanding of more comprehensive bioeconomy features is also developing and shaping the approach to the study of the sector, leading to a growing number of conceptual papers.

Based on the above, Viaggi et al. (2012) identified two broad areas of attention: (i) the bulk of specific research fields related to individual issues in the sphere of the bioeconomy: consumer sciences, markets, patenting rights and innovation, as well as the economic and social aspects of bioenergy, biotechnologies and biomaterials; and (ii) the need to address the broad concept of bioeconomy and to approach it in a comprehensive manner from an economic perspective.

The latter is undoubtedly the most challenging one and highlights the need for a more comprehensive view of the bioeconomy that is able to address the challenges of the interconnections among different components of the bioeconomy, different regional needs and different expectations. This demand also involves research and, while this may be common to all disciplines, it is especially true for economic research.

From a ‘disciplinary perspective’ (Viaggi et al., 2012), a potential disciplinary shift is envisioned from agriculture to bio-based economics and pathways for potential research developments in this direction. The literature has begun to mention an ‘economics of the bioeconomy’ (Viaggi et al., 2012) or ‘bioeconomy economics and policy’ (Wesseler et al., 2015).

As several ‘bio’ concepts have been associated with the study of economics and there is already a proliferation of such concepts, this book does not intend to coin any specific term for the subject nor take the (partial) perspective of one of those already in existence. For this reason, the contents of this book can be roughly identified as being centred on ‘bioeconomy economics and policy’, with the intention of picking up suggestions from sometimes different and contrasting fields to achieve a better understanding of the bioeconomy.

1.3 Why this Book

Taking a broad view on the existing work, the bioeconomy appears to be one of the most promising yet at the same...