SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND POLICY STUDIES WORKING GROUP

(RAPPORTEUR: W. LOCKERETZ)

"Socio-economic and policy studies" covers a very broad range of research. Consequently, one cannot judge the strengths and weaknesses of a particular research method independently from the particular topic being studied.

Therefore, we first developed a two-dimensional classification of socio-economic and policy studies in organic farming. The first dimension is the level of the study. In increasing order, these are:

1. Sub-farm (individual field, crop or enterprise).
2. Whole farm.
3. Community.
4. Region or area.
5. Nation.
6. International (up to global).

The second dimension is the topics of interest. In no particular order, these are:

1. Economic performance.
2. Markets.
3. Social or personal (e.g. values, attitudes).
4. Environmental impacts.
5. Policy issues.

The Workshop participants classified their own research according to these categories. (In this exercise, we did not attempt to cover work by others). The participants' research has predominantly fallen into several clusters:

1. Sub-farm or whole farm/economic performance.
2. Regional, national or international markets.
3. Regional, national or international policy issues.
4. Whole farm/social or personal.

A third dimension that must also be taken into account is the goals of the study of which we identify four possibilities:

1. Descriptive (studies that report what the current situation is in a particular aspect of organic farming, without any analysis, comparisons or considerations of alternatives).
2. Comparative (studies that compare organic and conventional farming with regard to performance measures such as yields, economic returns or environmental impacts).
3. Improvement (studies that try to improve the performance of an organic system according to any of these performance measures).
4. Projects (studies that attempt to predict the future status of organic farming under various assumptions or in response to various policy scenarios).

We then listed the methods that can be used in socio-economic and policy studies and rated the appropriateness of each method for studies with each of these possible goals. Time permitted us to do this for only two of the major combinations of level and topic of interest (given above).

For farm-level economic studies, possible methods are:

• Case studies (coded CS in the chart below):
• Surveys (S)
• Paired-farm comparison (PF)
• Linear programming (LP)
• Production budgets (PB)
• Farmer panel (FP)
• Expert group, e.g. Delphi method (EG).

The following summarizes the judgement of the group concerning the value of each of these methods for farm-level economic studies: (0 = not valuable; 1 = somewhat valuable; 2 = highly valuable):

	METHOD
GOAL	CS	S	PF	LP	PB	FP	EG
Descriptive	2	2	0	0	2	1	0
Comparative	1	0	2	0	2	2	0
Improvement	1	0	1	2	1	1	1
Projections	0	0	0	1	1	2	1

For studies of markets at the regional or national level, case studies are appropriate but some additional methods become available.

• Price analysis (PA)
• Expert surveys (ES) [Note: in contrast to "expert group" above, this involves either mail or telephone survey of people in a particular position in the industry, whereas "expert group" involves more intensive use of people who are individually selected for their expertise and judgement.
• Life-cycle analysis (LA)
• Food chain analysis (FA)

For regional or national marketing studies, the Workshop's judgement was as follows:

	METHOD
GOAL	CS	PA	ES	EG	LA	FA
Descriptive	2	2	2	0	1	2
Comparative	1	1	0	0	2	1
Improvement	2	0	1	1	1	2
Projections	1	1	1	2	0	0

One important qualifier for these charts is that the ratings vary by country depending on where the country stands regarding previous research on organic farming and on the size of its organic farming sector. Consequently, these ratings would also change over time in a given country.