EUROCROP : a concerted action on agricultural research for arable crops competitiveness

1 CETIOM direction scientifique, Grignon, France <pilorge@cetiom.fr> 2 Institute of Natural Fibres, Poznan, Poland 3 Department of Agricultural Economics and Engineering, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy Abstract: EUROCROP is a coordination action of the 6 Framework Programme (FP6-2004-SSP-4), involving the stakeholders and actors concerned by arable crops in Europe, which aims to propose research orientations to improve the competitiveness of the sector at the 2015 horizon. To reach this objective, EUROCROP developed 4 scenarios for 2015 and examined the main challenges for the arable crops sector. The EUROCROP project ends in December 2008 and will hold its final conference in Brussels in October 2008 to present its recommendations for arable crops research and collect comments.


Arable crops competitiveness?
For EUROCROP, the notion of competitiveness refers to the thinking frame of sustainable agriculture, and includes both economic competitiveness and compliance with environmental and social standards.
For its current works, EUROCROP distinguishes two main levels of competitiveness: 1.The economic competitiveness, which refers to a more or less short/medium term approach, with two sub entries: -economic competitiveness of Arable crops at farm level in EU countries (a crop versus other crops, arable crops versus other land uses) assuming the respect of current regulations when enforced; -economic competitiveness of EU arable crops on markets: meeting the demand of industries and consumers (as quantities, quality, specifications aspects, regularity of the production, sales prices...).2. The sustainability and cross compliance which constitute a medium term/ long term approach and rests upon assessment through indicators.This entry focuses on meeting society need, with a higher attention to social and environmental issues.
EUROCROP considers 8 arable crop chains, which received subsidies under the EU Common Agricultural Policies: Cereals (major and secondary), oilseeds crops, sugar-beet, Fibre crops, Potatoes, legumes crops, maize.More widely, it considers arable crops farming systems in their regional and global contexts (figure 1).
The arable crop chains may be considered as value chains whose activity presents positive or negative impacts on horizontal categories which correspond to public goods and involve some major groups of stakeholders (figure 1).

General organisation of the project
It is the reason why, to meet its goals, EURO-CROP uses a cross-cutting approach, first by arable crop (cereals, oilseeds, sugar beets, fibre crops, potatoes, grain legumes and maize), and second by transversal elements of the competitiveness including technical aspects at farming level, farm economics and production costs, outlets and markets, quality of agricultural products, environmental impacts and socio-economic issues (figure 2).EUROCROP brings together concerned stakeholders and actors, to reach a collective analysis through the elaboration of scenarios and the definition of main stakes and challenges for the arable crops sector.EUROCROP partnership includes organisations using research, including farmers' organisations, and organisations providing research, innovation and extension services.Stakeholders and representative organizations of civil society in the field of environment preservation and consumer advocate are integrated in the partnership of the project, and act especially in the Project Advisory Committee (PADCO).As shown in the figure 3, EUROCROP works on two interactive levels.In WP1, a strategic thinking has been developed, using basic foresight approaches at 2015 horizon, in 3 steps: -Identification of the main challenges to guarantee the AC competitiveness in 2015 future; -Building scenarios for context; -Ranking in priorities the research areas in coherence with the scenarios.At scientific level (WP2 and WP3) the identification of priority areas have been carried out through: -a preparatory work on the present research status and knowledge organized to take into consideration; the main challenges and the weaknesses of AC; -identifying priority research areas and research challenges to fill the gap (experts groups); -describing briefly the research areas deliverables.

What is the thinking frame for EUROCROP?
The consensus description of the arable crops context elaborated during the first year of the project could be summarized in the next figure (figure 4), which shows the main dimensions and factors which have to be taken into account to imagine the future challenges to the arable crops sector.This representation includes 5 external dimensions (Social and economics aspects IN EU, EU outlets and demand/World level markets and trade/Policies and regulations/Environment/ agriculture near context, rural socio economics) and 1 internal dimension.These dimensions are used to identify challenges and elaborate scenarios, constituting "visions of the future", and used to elaborate research strategies.

Preliminary outcome
The EUROCROP team reached a consensus to consider 4 scenarios, considered as relevant, coherent and plausible.They have no prevision dimension, do not pretend to cover all possibilities, but are only thinking frames used in some kind of "stress studies" allowing to determine what are the challenges which appear to be common to all scenarios, or part of them, and what challenges appear to be specific to a scenario or a situation, thus helping in making priorities.The interest of this approach lays in the fact that it permits to take into account several futures and seems to give chances to avoid critical gaps in making choices and better cover a single but uncertain future.It seems interesting to notice that the scenario which was considered as the most probable at the beginning of the group activity in 2006, is not anymore a tendency in 2008.Making strategies on a unique vision of future may reveal hazardous.These 4 contrasted scenarios are: -SC1: "WTO agreement and expensive energy", going on with the liberal world market logics: a WTO agreement is reached, the dominant agricultural model is clearly a productive business agriculture, the CAP is strongly reduced but its orientations are kept, in a context of sustained economic growth.-SC2: "Europe of regions": no WTO agreement is reached, but the dominant logic remains a liberal one with a double regionalisation: in bilateral agreements and in an increased autonomy of EU regions.The CAP is reduced and decentralized to "regions", on increased Subsidiarity bases.Many agricultural models (led by environment, leisure and tourism, local agro-industries, energy production...), emerge from territorial projects and coexist.
-SC3: "High environmental performance, green Europe": In this scenario, a growing concern about health and environment in opinion becomes a major driver of public policies.The CAP is reoriented to support the "Health & Environment Performing agriculture" (HEP) model.The context is a low economic growth with no WTO agreement.-SC4: "challenge of global warming": Global warming becomes sensible and leads the policies.CAP is reoriented to meet the triple necessity to "feed the world", produce energy and manage natural resources.A WTO agreement is reached.
Hypotheses were made on food and biofuels development aspects, and world demand in  The working groups also developed detailed descriptions of 66 research topics as answers to the main challenges and goals identified.
A dominant feature of the topics identified is the need for flexibility to adapt to changes in the environment (climate), policy and economic conditions.Rather than to specific scenarios, this vision is attached to the idea of a rapidly changing and often unpredictable context.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Overview of the methodology tasks organisation.

Figure 4 .
Figure 4.The crops system and its environment.