THE AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS SOCIETY
Newsletter
December 2024

Letter from the President
A call to arms: the need for agricultural economists!
 
The recent one-day DEFRA/AES conference on farm business resilience gave much food for thought. In addition to understanding on how to conceptualise, measure and support farm resilience, it provided a reminder - if one was needed - of the magnitude of challenges that are faced by farmers. As we are taught in AgEcon101, agriculture is inherently risky, and climate change is amplifying the risks faced by farmers yet further. Understanding the ways in which resilience can be supported in this context is vital.

Against this background, it is perhaps not surprising that the proposed changes to agricultural inheritance tax relief announced in the UK Autumn budget resulted in such a strong backlash from the sector, with unprecedented numbers of farmers descending on Westminster from across the UK to vent their concerns. Much of the immediate commentary and debate around the (partial) withdrawal of the tax exemption has focused on the number of farms affected with different parties frustratingly unable (or unwilling) to compare like with like. Beyond this, the change in the treatment of agricultural inheritance tax raises many important research questions including, most obviously, how (if at all) it will impact farm structures and land values, and its impact on farm resilience should a business need to restructure.

More generally, both the one-day conference and the reaction to the inheritance tax change highlighted the need for agricultural economics and, by extension, agricultural economists. While this will seem obvious to all those reading this Newsletter, the AES Executive have been discussing the need to better promote our discipline. I would like to thank all those who contributed to the recent blog on our website explaining what we do and why the world needs us (https://aes.ac.uk/blog_more.asp?blogID=13&page=1). Finally, thanks to the speakers and DEFRA team who organised and hosted the excellent one-day conference. I look forward to seeing many again in April 2025 at our Annual Conference Bordeaux.

Deb Roberts AES President 2024-25 (deb.roberts@hutton.ac.uk)      

The Defra-AES one-day conference on Whole Farm Business Resilience brought together around 90 attendees, with presentations and discussion from UK, other European and OECD speakers. Presentations are being posted on the AES website. Many thanks to Elle Brown, Lioba Wendling and Ciaran Devlin and Defra colleagues, and Katy Thorne (AES Administrator) for organizing a topical and lively event – with (as President Deb Roberts notes) a lot of potential research for agricultural economists!

Wilfrid Legg

Bordeaux will welcome the 2025 AES Annual Conference

We look forward to welcoming you to the 2025 AES Annual Conference to be held at the Bordeaux School of Economics in France from Monday to Wednesday 14-16 April 2025.

Deadlines: (Symposium and workshop proposals deadline was 15th December 2024)
Abstract submissions:  31st December 2024
Conference registration opens:  2nd January 2025
Acceptance of papers:  19th January 2025
Full paper submission and early bird registration:  2nd March 2025

Further information will follow, including logistical details, study visits and social events, so please regularly consult the AES website for updates.

The AES is approaching its Centenary and preparations are underway for the 2026 AES conference in Oxford, where the first conference was held. David Stead (UC Dublin) is competing a history of the Society in the context of the evolution of the agri-food economy and agricultural economics. The history will be launched as part of the Centenary event.

Hervé Dakpo, Programme Secretary (k-herve.dakpo@inrae.fr)

Highlights from the Mid-Term Executive meeting in 2024  
 
The Society held its annual Mid Term Executive (MTE) meeting at the Farmers Club in London on the 4th of October. Reports were received from the Society’s officers and it is worth picking out some of the points raised and discussed.

The Society held a successful ‘Dialogue with Industry’ meeting on the 26th of June; there was discussion at the MTE on how best to take this forward and there are plans for a follow up meeting in 2025. There were 14 travel awards made in the previous year: 8 for the EAAE PhD workshop and 6 for the ICAE 2024 conference. Reports by award candidates are available on the AES website. The new ‘Prize Article’ (previously the “Prize Essay”) competition received 9 submissions and the result of the competition will be announced at the 2025 conference in Bordeaux.

The theme of the August issue of EuroChoices was ‘Antimicrobial Resistance in Agriculture’, with articles reporting from the ROADMAP (H2020) research programme. EuroChoices continues to expand its reach and has a new co-editor, David Orden from Virginia Tech. The JAE also had a good year; a notable fact relating to submitted articles is the small number that originate from the UK: this prompted some discussion (see also the Society’s blog post on ‘What is Agricultural Economics’) and it was suggested that as part of the centenary year activities some thought be given by the Society on how to support the subject that it represents. Suggestions included part-financing a PhD in Agricultural Economics and this idea is being explored by Executive Committee members. Planning for the centenary year in 2026 continues and a working group has been set up to take forward and develop these plans. After two rounds of voting, Professor Alan Matthews was nominated as Centenary year President and we are delighted that he has accepted. The Centenary year also sees the retirement of some long-standing officers of the Society and plans are in place to seek replacement candidates.

Steve Ramsden, Chair of AES Executive (Steven.Ramsden1@nottingham.ac.uk)  

EuroChoices focuses on antibiotic use in animal production
 
This year has been an extremely busy one for the EuroChoices team. In late Summer we completed and published the findings of the extensive ROADMAP project, "How to Think about Agri-food Transitions Towards a 'Prudent' use of Antibiotics". I would particularly like to thank the two key project leaders in the ROADMAP team, Nicolas Fortané, INRAE and Sophia Molia, CIRAD; they both advocate that reducing the use of antibiotics in animal farming is one of the major challenges facing the problem of antimicrobial resistance. The final issue for 2024 is in production and will lead with a very extensive article on "Productivity-led Pathways to Sustainable Agricultural Growth: Six Decades of Progress"

John Davis, Editor in Chief (eurochoices@aes.ac.uk)

The OECD Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation Outlook 2024 has just been published and provides a comprehensive analysis and global reference on government support to agriculture across 54 countries, which shows that total support to agriculture averaged USD 842 billion per year during the 2021-23 period. Support remains concentrated in a few large economies, with China, the United States, India and the European Union representing 37%, 15%, 14% and 13% of the total respectively. Although public support for agriculture has declined since 2021 it remains near historic highs and is still not sufficiently directed at critical innovation, productivity and sustainability goals, according to a new report from the OECD.

In this context, the share of estimated support dedicated to general services such as innovation, biosecurity or infrastructure averaged only 12.6% of total support in 2021-23. While it has been fairly stable since 2020, this share is well below the 16% seen at the beginning of the 21st century. These services are key elements in countries’ efforts towards sustainable productivity growth – the ability to produce more with less while reducing demands on the environment. (https://doi.org10.1787/74da57ed-en)

This Newsletter is also circulated with the Journal of Agricultural Economics. The deadline for items for the next issue is 5th April 2025, to wilfrid_legg@hotmail.com