Abstract: Agreeing that increased future global food demand will have to be met by production intensification rather than land use expansion (Hertel, 2011), scientists have moved to empirically analysing the causes for differences between potentially attainable yields and actually realized yields – the yield gap (Neumann et al., 2010). We aim at disentangling the effects of biophysical, economic and political impacts and farmers’ response to them on crop yields based on reviewing theoretical and empirical literature and some descriptive data analysis.

Abstract: Climate change impacts on food production, socioeconomic changes (population and income growth  in large parts of the world) and biofuel policies affecting demand quantities have risen scientific,  political and public interest in long-term forecasts on food security. Whereas first quantitative analyses  from global economic models are starting to appear (e.g. (von Lampe et al., under review)), similar  studies on smaller regional scales are not yet available. However, acknowledging that climate change  affects crop yields differently across scales and regions (e.g. (Reidsma et al., 2007)) and considering  the specific political setting given through the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in Europe, the  MACSUR project focuses on the impact of climate change and socioeconomic changes on European  agriculture and its contribution to global food security. We present a Europe-wide analysis of the  effect of selected climate and socioeconomic scenarios on food security in terms of food prices using  the Common Agricultural Policy Regionalised Impact modelling system (CAPRI). No Label