Background and Objective

The question of the significance of imports in terms of agricultural value added can be answered in four steps:

Part 1: Description of imports and their usage in German agriculture. This allows to identify goods which are imported for supply with impacts on farmers’ income and others without impacting agricultural incomes. For this purpose, the categories ’competitive’, ‘neutral’ and ‘intermediate’ were created. The usage of goods with impacts has to be defined for the next step. The following questions are asked: Which imported goods in the scope of the EAA are of single or multi-purpose for intermediate consumption in agriculture? Which quantities and values do these goods have? In the next step, goods in foreign trade were assigned to the CRONOS codes at the level of the eight-digit HS codes. The classification was broken down into products with a use at the level of agriculture and goods with a use in the rest of the economy or trade. Only goods with direct comparability at agricultural level (e.g., cereals) or for use as inputs are included in the investigations. Other products imported directly from the manufacturing industry remain outside the consideration. Likewise, goods for trade in food goods are excluded. The result is a list of goods that is comparable to the ones in the CRONOS list. The list was then supplemented by foreign trade data on volumes and values. 

Part 2: The impact of goods of the category ‘competing’ on the domestic price level is examined. For this purpose, the available data from foreign trade and domestic producer prices are first compared. The aim of the analysis is to describe the effect or the relationship of imports on the level of producer prices in a given year. For this purpose, unit values were calculated in the EAA and in foreign trade. The Pearson coefficient was used to determine whether the same behavior of producer prices and import and export prices can be observed.

Part 3: Search for information and data to estimate the impact of imported intermediate goods on agricultural production value. Modelling calculation methods for further use. Specifically, the focus was thereby on the four areas ‘Live Animal Imports’, ‘Feed Imports’, ‘Fertilizer Imports’ and ‘Seed Imports’. The impact of the respective intermediate goods is considered individually and the analyses are carried out ex post.

Part 4: Examination of the transferability of the calculation models to other EU member states (including Switzerland). Integration of the various approaches into an overall model. To answer the question about data availability in other EU member states, a survey will be sent to the EAA ‘Working Group’.