CULTIVAR 1 - Volatilidade dos Mercados Agrícolas

26 truments that, by focusing on land as reference, land use as a condition, and land use change as a policy target, tried to address the need for the joint delivery of the public and the private good from agriculture. The 2013 CAP reform, which in broad terms stayed close to the broad orientations of theCom- mission proposal (although clearly not in all its details), aimed at responding to these new chal- lenges and needs by: • identifying the market failures that the CAP needs to address, which relate both to the accep- ted failure of markets to accurately price environmental public goods, but also to the unexpec- ted failure of market prices to play their role in a transparent way along the food chain. • specifying the areas where specific CAP measures, which may have played a positive role in past reforms, fail to meet the future challenges as they are today. • addressing “jointly” the need to complement the delivery of private and public goods at the farm level, an objective at risk as a result of the tension between the need tominimise the eco- nomic costs of agricultural production at times of high input prices while in parallel address environmental costs from a long-term perspective. “Greening”, that is the mandatory requirement for farmers to respect a minimum of practices to receive part of their direct payment, is central in approach. But this is not limited to the propo- sal that every farmer respect the mandatory measures linked to soil, carbon and biodiversity. It is also accompanied by a series of other measures that aim at making greening much more linked to the specific challenges facing European agriculture from climate change adaptation and miti- gation to the adoption of innovations. The significant boost in agricultural research, including research that is linked to practical questions that farmers face on the ground, and the improved knowledge transfer through a man- datory farm advisory system, are all elements that try to reverse the negative trends of the past that resulted in a slowdown of productivity growth in the European Union. With this approach, price volatility is not essentially addressed as a problem to be resolved directly (an implicit recognition of the fact that is mainly driven by factors exogenous to agricul- ture). Rather, price volatility is addressed as a reality to which farmers have to adjust by retaining the basic layer of direct and fixed income support that the latter receive (which mitigates the impact of price volatility on income volatility), but shifting its targeting away from references re- flecting past production levels towards references reflecting future production potential (land). The final decision on CAP reform reflects the reality, not just for the EU but also for global agriculture, that in a world characterised by the complex interrelationship of so many factors af- fecting the food sector, it is not single isolated measures, but a set of coherent policy instruments reflecting the specificity of different regions that would maximise policy efficiency. For the CAP, the manner by which its recent reform will be implemented will be the test on whether its new specific policy targeting would increase its efficiency.