Ongoing Projects

BrightSpace (2022-2027)

BrightSpace is 5-year project funded under Horizon Europe that aims to design a roadmap for effective and sustainable strategies for assessing and addressing the challenges of EU agriculture to navigate within a Safe and Just Operating Space (SJOS).

The European Green Deal, aims, among others, to increase the contribution of EU agriculture to climate change action, improve the management of natural resources, ensure a fair economic return for farmers, and reinforce the protection of biodiversity. EU agriculture and food practices are currently not on the right track to meet the Green Deal ambitions and objectives. These objectives are interdependent, and while often aligned, they may also compete. Synergies and trade-offs between socio-economic and environmental outcomes are brought together in the concept of a Safe and Just Operating Space (SJOS), where the Safe component reflects the bio-physical boundaries of the ecosystem and the Just component the requirements for the well-being of the involved people.

Link: https://brightspace-project.eu/

TRADE4SD

In June 2021, the Horizon 2020 project Trade4SD started. Trade4SD is a 4-year project that fosters the positive effects of trade in achieving the UN Sustainable development goals. The premise of this project is that trade policies can be designed to promote access to the markets, ensure fair prices, contribute to environmental goals, and alleviate rural poverty around the world.

Therefore, the AGMEMOD team from Thünen Institute, together with 13 partners from Europe, Africa, and Asia are developing a new and robust sustainability toolbox integrating partial and general equilibrium models with sustainable development indicators. It especially involves the stakeholder’s opinions from the EU, Ghana, and Vietnam to feed into the analysis. All that will foster the policy recommendations for improving the sustainability impacts of trade policies. Furthermore, it will create new opportunities for agents in the agri-food value chains around the globe.

Link: https://www.trade4sd.eu/

Thünen Baseline

Every second year, the Thünen Institute generates projections of the situation on agri-food markets in Germany. Focal questions are how prices, supply, demand and trade will change yearly in the next 10 years. Then results are discussed with Federal and State Ministries in Germany. The generation of a baseline supports the political decision making process by providing quantitative projections of future agri-food markets developments that are currently influenced by policy or over which policy could have an influence.. A baseline is not a forecast of the future but describes expected developments under current policies considering assumptions of future values of exogenous variables not covered in the system like e.g. population, what some economists terms “conditional forecasts” . This baseline is then used as counterfactual scenario to simulate effects of alternative policies.

The AGMEMOD team from Thünen Institute are responsible for the modelling of important agri-food markets and their interactions of the EU Member States. AGMEMOD uses prices and quantities.

EU Agricultural outlook for markets and income

Since 2015 the AGMEMOD network has participated in the process through which the European Commission’s Directorate General for Agriculture has produced its annual medium-term agricultural outlook for the EU. The medium-term outlook contains projections for the major EU agricultural commodity markets (arable crops, biofuels, meat, dairy products, olive oil, wine, peaches and nectarines, apples and tomatoes) and agricultural incomes to 2030, based on a set of coherent macroeconomic assumptions deemed most plausible at the time of the analysis. The projections assume a continuation of current agricultural and trade policies.

Link:https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/data-and-analysis/markets/outlook/medium-term_en