Trade policies. Over the last decades, trade policies greatly affected producers’ strategies in two main ways. A first one is indirect, through the effect they had on agricultural policies. For instance, the Xxx- Xxxxxx reform in 1992 was a clear consequence of ongoing trade negotiations under the Uruguay Round. At the beginning of the 21st century, the Agenda 2000 and the Mid Term Reform of 2004, with the introduction of the second pillar to xxxxxx “multifunctional agriculture”, resulted from an anticipation of the European Commission of what could come out of the Doha negotiation round (Fouilleux, 2004). The protein deficit of Europe is also a consequence of early trade negotiations 13 For example, direct sales between farmers and consumers represent only 2 % of the fresh food market, and on average, only about 15 % of EU farms sell more than half of their production directly to consumers (Xxxxxx-Xxxxxxx, 2016). 14 These trends are currently much more visible in Western European countries than in Central / Eastern ones. In the next steps of this work, more attention will be given to the differences that actually exist between regions. 15 We did not try to distinguish between “direct” and “indirect” drivers (as in XxXxxxxx et al., 2009b) since all the drivers described below have both direct and indirect impacts on producers’ strategies. under the Xxxxxx Round in 1960-61, during which import duties for soy were removed (Xxxxxx, 2014). While the 1973 US soybean embargo caused Europe to relaunch incentives to encourage oil and protein crops, the resulting increased in protein crop production was though short-lived (Figure 18). In 1992, the Xxxxx House agreement with the US indeed limited the supported protein crop area to 5.5 million hectares, leading to a sharp decrease in protein crop production. Figure 18: Pulse production and usage in EU-15 countries. Source: Authors’ calculations, based on FAOSTAT (2017). The second way in which trade policies had impacts on producers’ strategies is more direct and also more recent. The progressive liberalisation of agricultural trade led European farmers to compete with other farmers on international markets as well as on domestic markets. The direct consequence was the obligation for farmers to produce at world market prices – though direct payment have buffered this effect – in a context where their endowment in production factors could be quite different from the one of their competitors across the globe. This further stimulat- ed...
