FP6 -6581 ENFA - European Non-Food Agriculture

Contacts
Website: www.fnu.zmaw.de/European_Non-Food_Agriculture.5700.0.html




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Type of Project	Specific Support Action
Contract No	FP6 - 6581
Total Cost	914 KEuro
EC Contribution	914 KEuro
Start Date	1-5-2005
Duration	36 Months

Abstract

The ENFA project will establish a dynamic agricultural and forest sector model for the integrated economic and environmental assessment of non-food alternatives in European agriculture and forestry. This tool will be used to analyze market and environmental impacts from the adoption of non-food strategies. Market impacts include supply potentials for agricultural non-food product lines under alternative policy and technology scenarios, supply, price, and trade effects for traditional agricultural and forestry products, and measures of rural community change such as changes in farm welfare, labor demand, and land values.

Environmental impact estimates will include measures of emissions pertaining to greenhouse gases, soil erosion, and nutrient leaching as well as biodiversity impacts.

To achieve its objectives, the ENFA project will integrate engineering science and micro economic analysis for major non-food production lines with traditional agricultural and forest sector analysis across Europe. The proposed analysis will be intensively linked to many completed and ongoing European research projects and will join leading research institutes in the non-food arena.

The ENFA modelling tool will combine both traditional (mainly related to food) and alternative (mainly related to non-food) management choices in the agriculturaland forestry sectors with promising non-food options. The ENFAmodel will contain several key features

• The traditional agricultural sector is completely represented across the EU through representative production technologies for major traditional products
• Active agricultural policies will be integrated
• Major non-food opportunities are implemented simultaneously across the EU
• Product prices for traditional agricultural products and production levels for both traditional and renewable products will be endogenous
• Non-food industrial products will face industrial demand curve
• ENFA can solve for the market equilibrium subject to various policy and/or technology scenarios
• Technological coefficients, resource endowments, demand and supply function parameters can be easily updated. The model can be easily expanded to cover new technologies and new regions

To find the competitive economic potential of non-food opportunities, it is very important to include traditional food production technologies and traditional agricultural markets. Profit expectations from traditional agricultural and forest production impose opportunity costs for alternative non-food production lines. For a non-food production line to be implemented, it is not enough to return satisfactory net profits. The non-food production line to be implemented must be superior to all other alternatives. For example, a miscanthus - electricity production line having a positive expected net return of 100 Euro per ha will not be implemented unless all other available strategies (for example a wheat production line) have lower net returns.

ENFA will contribute to policy development. The consortium members in dialogue with the Commission will jointly determine reasonable policy scenarios. The impacts of these policy scenarios will be assessed with ENFA model and important findings will made available to the Commission and to other parties of interest. Coordinator

Hamburg University, Germany

Partners

• Utrecht University, the Netherlands
• Trinity College University of Dublin, Ireland
• Plant Breeding and Genetics, IGER, United Kingdom
• Agrotechnology and Food Innovations B.V.
• Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
• Institute for Fuels and Renewable Energy, Warszawa, Poland
• University of Hohenheim, Germany
• Agricultural University, Athens, Greece
• Joanneum Research, Graz, Austria
• INRA, Thiverval-Grignon, France
• Obersteiner Consulting Engineers (OCE), Austria
• University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria

Contacts

Coordinator

• Uwe SCHNEIDER / Hamburg University GERMANY