Volume 123 - Issue 1

In 2015, all 193 UN member countries agreed to halve global food losses and waste by the year 2030. In this article, we are going to explore why the first official study on food loss and waste (FLW) by Gustavsson et al. FAO, 2011 cannot be used as a reasonable basis for policymaking – even though it underlies Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3. Then we will look at the new proposal by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which aims to harmonise the methodology for FLW research employing the Food Loss Index (FLI). In particular, we are going to assess the suitability of the FLI as a tool for policymaking. We would like to highlight that although both papers have played an important role in raising awareness about the global problem of FLW and in encouraging further research, they do not solve such important issues as providing a unified definition of FLW, the aggregation of heterogeneous commodities within a single category, and the absence of a methodology and data, both of which are certainly needed for policymaking. The objective of the article is to start a discussion about those issues, as even the recent flagship FAO...

The agricultural sector and how it relates to climate change is today emerging as a central subject of debate and critique, because it is heavily impacted by, and at the same time, a primary contributor to, climate change. The intertwined, complex relationship between the sector and climate change is among the unprecedented challenges now facing the European Union (EU). The complexity of the relationship calls for the establishment of a sustainable, future climate-proof, adapted and resilient sector with strong adaptive capacity. This paper argues that over the past decades, strong emphasis has been placed on how to mitigate the negative effects of climate change across the sector, causing it to fall behind in terms of adaptation. Although adaptation is now part of the sector’s development agenda, sectoral adaptation performance across member states remains low. In order to justify an accelerated adaptation process across the sector, the paper develops a Relative Climate Change Adaption Index (RCCAI) for the sector based on Eurostat data. The analysis shows that there is no single member state across the EU whose agricultural sector can be considered as fully climate-adapted (resilient), and thus validates the hypothesis that adaption efforts must be stepped up across the sector....

Agriculture is a pillar of Serbia’s economic development. Consequently, this paper provides an overview and analysis of the status of farms in Serbia, with a special focus on finding factors influencing the sustainable development of small-scale family farms. To facilitate simpler and more precise problem-solving and decision-making processes for improving the farms’ operations, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model is used in this paper. This model is applied to the selection of key economic determinants for small farms’ viability, illustrated through the results of the authors’ own survey of 550 small farms in Serbia, which refers to the economic, social and environmental aspects of small farms’ operation. By applying the criteria for selecting key economic indicators of a small farm, the multi-criteria assessment results can be utilised to inform more effective business and policy decisions directed at improving the operation of small-scale family farms. The survey results show that the best-ranked determinants for the viability of small farms in Serbia are first, the price of agricultural products, and next, wellstructured agricultural product distribution channels.

In order to provide food security for a growing population, abundant crop production is necessary. Globally, unpredictable natural and human factors are the result of the unforeseen consequences of agricultural productivity. Appropriate land tenure, proper labour allocation, and higher agricultural mechanisation levels are the fuel to boost agricultural productivity. China has implemented various policies such as its farmland protection policies, rural-labour allocation to off-farm industries, and agricultural mechanisation subsidies to induce grain self-sufficiency. However, farmland loss is an increasing trend; surplus rural labour continues to exist; and agricultural mechanisation has not reached the required level of quality and quantity. With this in mind, this study examines the long- and short-term impacts of farmland supply, rural-labour supply, and agricultural  mechanisation development on grain-crop yields in China. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to co-integration and error correction was applied to data over the period 1978-2017. The results show that farmland supply and agricultural mechanisation developments are positively associated with the growth of grain-crop yields in both the short- and long-term. However, the impact of the rural labour supply on grain yield is insignificant. Strengthening farmland protection policies and promoting innovation-based agricultural mechanisation development plays an important role in sustainable food production....

This paper has used multilateral foreign divestment (FD) data covering 1991 to 2017 for 50 countries, fitted to an optimised model based on microeconomic theory, to estimate the drivers of FD out of agriculture. Identifying the factors that determine FD would offer an opportunity for policymakers to know what kind of policies can discourage FD. Furthermore, knowledge of the directional effect would offer a way to use the policy variables to appropriately influence FD. Market size, exchange rate, political regime characteristics and transitions as well as the level of development drive FD out of agriculture globally. Trade openness and access to land resources have not been found to determine FD. Consequently, agricultural economy managers should work towards increasing the size of the agricultural economy; they should also liaise with their respective country’s Central Banks with a view to ensure exchange rate stability, and with their governments in order to promote better political regime characteristics and smoother political transitions.