Simulateur pédagogique des effets de répartition des soutiens de la PAC au niveau national

The latest reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which was decided by the Member States of the European Union in 2013, has again modified some of the modalities with which the different types of direct payments are allocated to farmers. The reform concerns first Pillar « decoupled » payments as well as « coupled » payments, and leaves Member States with a great flexibility in how to implement the various policy measures inside a common framework. In this paper, we present a tool (which was developed with Excel and is compatible with the LibreOffice package) which allows to simulate the implementation of the main aspects of the reform, and to assess their impacts both in terms of payment distribution across farms and in terms of income. Being an educational tool, it is neither an academic effort which would precisely model the impact of the latest reform, nor a device which would permit to estimate the exact amount of support a specific farmer could claim in practice. It is based on the French strand of the Farm Accounting Data Network (FADN) and allows to analyse the choices made by France in 2013, shedding light on the underlying rationale which may have motivated the decisions. Because its initial purpose was the lifelong training of agricultural yet non-CAP or non-economics specialist professionals, the proposed simulation tool comes with a user-friendly interface and has also already been used for the initial training of Agrocampus Ouest students and with an even larger audience during the INRA’s 70th birthday Open Days in Rennes in 2016. Building on these experiences, we are currently incorporating this simulation tool inside an Agreenium-IAVFF MOOC dedicated to the economics of the European agricultural policy.