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Concept
Agricultural policy
Summary
Agricultural policy describes a set of laws relating to domestic agriculture and imports of foreign agricultural products. Governments usually implement agricultural policies with the goal of achieving a specific outcome in the domestic agricultural product markets.
Agricultural policies use predetermined goals, objectives and pathways set by an individual or government for the purpose of achieving a specified outcome, for the benefit of the individual(s), society and the nations' economy at large. Agricultural policies take into consideration the primary, secondary and tertiary processes in agricultural production. Outcomes can involve, for example, a guaranteed supply level, price stability, product quality, product selection, land use or employment.
Agriculture has large impacts on climate change, estimated to be contributing 20–25% of global annual emissions as of 2010. Moreover, agriculture is highly vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change, such as decreases in water access, geophysical processes such as ocean level rise and changing weather, and socioeconomic processes that affect farmers, many of whom are in subsistence economic conditions. In order for global climate change mitigation and adaptation to be effective a wide range of policies need to be implemented to reduce the risk of negative climate change impacts on agriculture and greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector.
An example of the breadth and types of agriculture policy concerns can be found in the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics article "Agricultural Economies of Australia and New Zealand" which says that the major challenges and issues faced by their industrial agriculture industry are:
marketing challenges and consumer tastes
international trading environment (world market conditions, barriers to trade, quarantine and technical barriers, maintenance of global competitiveness and market image, and management of biosecurity issues affecting imports and the disease status of exports)
biosecurity (pests and diseases such as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), avian influenza, foot and mouth disease, citrus canker, and sugarcane smut)
infrastructure (such as transport, ports, telecommunications, energy and irrigation facilities)
management skills and labor supply (With increasing requirements for business planning, enhanced market awareness, the use of modern technology such as computers and global positioning systems and better agronomic management, modern farm managers will need to become increasingly skilled.
Official source
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Related concepts (7)
Food system
The term food system describes the interconnected systems and processes that influence nutrition, food, health, community development, and agriculture. A food system includes all processes and infrastructure involved in feeding a population: growing, harvesting, processing, packaging, transporting, marketing, consumption, distribution, and disposal of food and food-related items. It also includes the inputs needed and outputs generated at each of these steps.
Agricultural subsidy
An agricultural subsidy (also called an agricultural incentive) is a government incentive paid to agribusinesses, agricultural organizations and farms to supplement their income, manage the supply of agricultural commodities, and influence the cost and supply of such commodities. Examples of such commodities include: wheat, feed grains (grain used as fodder, such as maize or corn, sorghum, barley and oats), cotton, milk, rice, peanuts, sugar, tobacco, oilseeds such as soybeans and meat products such as beef, pork, and lamb and mutton.
Common Agricultural Policy
The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the agricultural policy of the European Union. It implements a system of agricultural subsidies and other programmes. It was introduced in 1962 and has since then undergone several changes to reduce the EEC budget cost (from 73% in 1985, to 37% in 2017) and consider rural development in its aims. It has however, been criticised on the grounds of its cost, its environmental, and humanitarian effects.