water@leeds and Global Food and Environment Institute Seminar

Legitimacy and Priorities for Agricultural Income Support Schemes: Experimental Evidence from Scotland

Dr Klaus Glenk; SRUC, Scotland's Rural College

Venue: Seminar Room 2, 8.11, School of Geography

Thursday 10 November, 14:00 - 15:00

Please register here

Klaus is Reader in Environmental Economics at SRUC, Edinburgh, and a Visiting Research Fellow in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds. He is an economist with a focus on environmental valuation applied to various policy contexts including climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, and freshwater and coastal management.

Summary

Following Brexit, it is important to re-establish the policy legitimacy for agricultural income support as a significant expenditure in UK government budgets. This survey-based study provides empirical evidence on views of the Scottish public for key guiding principles and characteristics that should shape future support payments.

We take a novel perspective by focusing on the acceptability of support for individual farmers, enabled through a multi-factorial survey experiment (MFE). The MFE investigates the effect of depending on farm and farmer characteristics on (i) general acceptability of payments; (ii) perceived fairness of income support; (iii) willingness to be supplied with produce by the farmer; and (iv) willingness to petition for continued financial support for the farmer with local politicians. In addition to the MFE, the survey included a Best-Worst-Scaling (BWS) exercise to derive preference rankings for important guiding principles for the design of an agricultural support scheme. With a Scottish Government commitment to bring forward a new Agricultural Bill to replace the Common Agricultural Policy in 2023, our study provides information on alignment of policy direction with public support.