Product-oriented policy for agricultural production
The consumption of meat and dairy products contributes on average 24 % of the environmental impacts from the total final consumption in EU-27, while constituting only 6 % of the economic value. The monetarised environmental impacts (externalities) are of considerable size compared to the private costs of the products (from 34% of the private costs for pork to 112% of the private costs for beef). Per kg slaughtered weight, there is a clear difference between the three types of meat, with beef having 4 to 8 times larger environmental impacts than poultry and up to 5 times larger than pork. These were some of the findings of our largest policy-oriented study in the agricultural sector to date, which was performed for the EU-commission DG-JRC, IPTS, Sevilla, to identify and prioritise the improvement options for meat and dairy production in EU-27. We identified and quantified the improvement options for all processes contributing more than 10% to each of the environmental impact category. However, even if all these improvement options would be successfully
implemented, the impact from meat and dairy products would still amount to 19 % of the aggregated impact of EU-27 total final consumption. This seems to suggest that large reductions in the overall impacts from meat and dairy products cannot be obtained from the identified improvement options alone, but would require targeting the level and mode of consumption as such. The report is publicly available.
In our first study on “Product-oriented environmental policy for agricultural production” (report in Danish language with English summary) we applied the Logical Framework Approach (LFA) to identify the problem areas and the possible role of product-oriented policy measures. Combined with an actor analysis, this led us to conclude that the measures with the largest potential were market-oriented measures, e.g. differentiating agricultural subsidies according to environmental performance. In comparison to these measures, it would require disproportionately large investments to increase the demand for food products with a documented low environmental effect, e.g. through a labelling and certification scheme.
The basic prerequisite for a product-oriented approach is that the environmental effect can be recorded per unit of product (i.e. per tonne of wheat, per kg of pork, per 1000 kg of milk, etc.) To enable this, we proposed an extension of the existing PC tools to produce ”green accounts” and used in farm planning, so that the present records per farm unit can be related to the amount of each product from the farm. In a follow-up project (report in Danish language with English summary), we developed a spreadsheet version of the suggested tool, and tested it on 16 farms. The tool combines specific farm data with background LCA data for farm inputs.
The follow-up of this was the study “Preconditions and foresight for product oriented measures in the agricultural sector”, which outlined the current state of the art and provided a foresight study with three scenarios that differ with respect to the role assigned to the product-oriented approach – the life-cycle thinking:
- Mainly as a way to identify improvement options in ”The environmentally efficient agricultural sector”,
- to document the environmental performance of the products and to use this to maintain and enlarge market shares in the scenario ”Environmental documentation as competition parameter”, and
- to develop new products, increasing the customer satisfaction and value creation in the chain while reducing the environmental impact in the ”De-coupled growth” scenario.
For each scenario, a number of development projects were proposed. The precondition and foresight reports are in Danish language only.
One of the development projects proposed for the scenario ”Environmental documentation as competition parameter” was a benchmarking study, comparing the environmental impacts of competing agricultural products, with the aim of identifying and prioritising the areas where the Danish environmental performance could be improved, and to assess how Danish enterprises could utilize this knowledge on the international marketplace. With a new grant from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, we carried out such a benchmarking study for pig and milk production (Report with summary and annexes in English). The pig production was compared between USA, Brazil, Spain, The Netherlands and Denmark, and the milk production across different European farm types.
More projects on food products.