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water@leeds and Global Food and Environment Institute Seminar

Date

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

Invited speaker: Dr Klaus Glenk, SRUC Scotland’s Rural College

Thursday 10 November, 14:00 – 15:00

Seminar Room 2, 8.11 School of Geography

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.

For any further information contact us at water@leeds.ac.uk.