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Agriculture plays a crucial role in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals, with organic farming being one important potential contributor to environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Despite a national goal of 20% organic agriculture, currently only 6.2% of Germany's farmland is organic, and conversion rates are slowing down. However, one bright spot is organic viticulture in Germany, which has four times higher conversion rates, but literature on organic viticulture in Germany is scarce and it is unknown what factors contribute to its relative success. We used the largest wine regions in Germany, Pfalz and Rheinhessen, as a case study to investigate winegrowers' motives and barriers to convert to organic farming in practice. We compared our interview results with literature from throughout the European Union, analyzing the findings using the five capitals framework to assess livelihood strategies. The results indicate that the motives for organic farming most often identified in the literature and interviews are a pro-organic ideology of the farmer (human capital) and supportive social networks (social capital). Barriers to convert to organic farming were skeptical attitudes toward social networks (social capital) and doubting the environmental benefits of organic winegrowing, especially the use of copper (natural capital). Additional barriers were a farmer's ideology against organic farming (human capital), identified from the interviews, while the literature discussed financial risks, especially during the conversion periods (financial capital). In the particular case of organic wines in Pfalz and Rheinhessen, it was important to be able to tell a story around wines that stresses wine quality. We conclude that potential avenues to increase organic farming in Germany include addressing the use and environmental impacts of copper, addressing ideological barriers against organic farming, supporting the possibility to tell the story behind a wine, and increased financial support.

Agriculture provides many benefits to people, such as producing food and creating jobs in rural areas, but it can also have negative impacts on the environment. We analysed existing monitoring indicators for the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to evaluate whether the CAP is effectively achieving multiple social and environmental goals. We found that the current CAP monitoring system is unable to balance many potentially competing goals because its indicators are biased towards a few objectives. We suggest the European Union and its Member States adopt a broader set of indicators covering clear targets when the policy is reformed after 2020.

In recent years, Large Scale Land Acquisitions (LSLA), direct land tenure changes have been gaining momentum in developing countries. In this study, we evaluate the potential extent to which agricultural land deals in Africa are able to address the host countries' food security needs, a commonly cited motivation for their establishment. First, we develop a framework to evaluate the priority food security needs of 38 African countries in 2000 based on indicators of food availability, accessibility, stability, and utilization. Second, we estimate whether the crops from land deals would be sold on export or local food markets based on the origin of investments (domestic, foreign or mixed), type of investors (eg. agribusiness, finance, or government) and the intended crops (eg. food, cash crop, or biofuel). This enables us to estimate how likely the investment is to improve in-country food security, versus serving other purposes (e.g., speculation, enclosure of natural resources). Third, we account for the characteristics of the locations where the deals happen (population density, land cover and distance to markets) in order to estimate the level of conflict and deforestation that they could exacerbate. We find that LSLA are only likely to address the identified food security needs of 7 countries. LSLA are also at risk of increasing land pressures and conflicts or deforestation on 83% of the acquired area, including in countries where they could meet food security needs. We also find that the more productive lands are most often allocated to flex crops, while food crops are produced on more marginal lands. We thus argue that even when their purpose is agricultural production, most LSLA are not likely to improve food security; rather, they often serve the financial interests of transnational companies and local elites with the support of host governments. Finally, we recommend agricultural investments to be elaborated in consultation with local communities and marginalized groups to sustainably support their ...

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the guiding policy for agriculture and the largest single budget item in the European Union (EU). Agriculture is essential to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but the CAP's contribution to do so is uncertain. We analyzed the distribution of (sic)59.4 billion of 2015 CAP payments and show that current CAP spending exacerbates income inequality within agriculture, while little funding supports climate-friendly and biodiverse farming regions. More than (sic)24 billion of 2015 CAP direct payments went to regions where average farm incomes are already above the EU median income. A further (sic)2.5 billion in rural development payments went to primarily urban areas. Effective monitoring indicators are also missing. We recommend redirecting and better monitoring CAP payments toward achieving the environmental, sustainability, and rural development goals stated in the CAP's new objectives, which would support the SDGs, the European Green Deal, and green COVID-19 recovery.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the guiding policy for agriculture and the largest single budget item in the European Union (EU). Agriculture is essential to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but the CAP's contribution to do so is uncertain. We analyzed the distribution of ?59.4 billion of 2015 CAP payments and show that current CAP spending exacerbates income inequality within agriculture, while little funding supports climate-friendly and biodiverse farming regions. More than ?24 billion of 2015 CAP direct payments went to regions where average farm incomes are already above the EU median income. A further ?2.5 billion in rural development payments went to primarily urban areas. Effective monitoring indicators are also missing. We recommend redirecting and better monitoring CAP payments toward achieving the environmental, sustainability, and rural development goals stated in the CAP's new objectives, which would support the SDGs, the European Green Deal, and green COVID-19 recovery.

Agriculture is widely recognized as critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but researchers, policymakers, and practitioners have multiple, often conflicting yet poorly documented priorities on how agriculture could or should support achieving the SDGs. Here, we assess consensus and divergence in priorities for agricultural systems among research, policy, and practice perspectives and discuss the implications for research on trade-offs among competing goals. We analyzed the priorities given to 239 environmental and social drivers, management choices, and outcomes of agricultural systems from 69 research articles, the SDGs and four EU policies, and seven agricultural sustainability assessment tools aimed at farmers. We found all three perspectives recognize 32 variables as key to agricultural systems, providing a shared area of focus for agriculture's contribution to the SDGs. However, 207 variables appear in only one or two perspectives, implying that potential trade-offs may be overlooked if evaluated from only one perspective. We identified four approaches to agricultural land systems research in Europe that omit most of the variables considered important from policy and practice perspectives. We posit that the four approaches reflect prevailing paradigms of research design and data analysis and suggest future research design should consider including the 32 shared variables as a starting point for more policy- and practice-relevant research. Our identification of shared priorities from different perspectives and attention to environmental and social domains and the functional role of system components provide a concrete basis to encourage codesigned and systems-based research approaches to guide agriculture's contribution to the SDGs.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest budget item in the European Union, but varied data reporting hampers holistic analysis. Here we have assembled the first dataset to our knowledge to report individual CAP payments by standardized CAP funding measures and geolocation. We created this dataset by translating, geolocating to the county or province (NUTS3) level, and consistently harmonizing payment measures for over 16 million payments from 2015, originally reported by EU member states and compiled by the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. This dataset and code allow in-depth analysis of over €60 billion in public spending by purpose and location for the first time, which enables both individual payment tracing and analysis by aggregation. These data are representative of the distribution of annual CAP payments from 2014 to 2020 and are of interest to researchers, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and journalists for evaluating the distribution and impacts of CAP spending.

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is the largest budget item in the European Union, but varied data reporting hampers holistic analysis. Here we have assembled the first dataset to our knowledge to report individual CAP payments by standardized CAP funding measures and geolocation. We created this dataset by translating, geolocating to the county or province (NUTS3) level, and consistently harmonizing payment measures for over 16 million payments from 2015, originally reported by EU member states and compiled by the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany. This dataset and code allow in-depth analysis of over €60 billion in public spending by purpose and location for the first time, which enables both individual payment tracing and analysis by aggregation. These data are representative of the distribution of annual CAP payments from 2014 to 2020 and are of interest to researchers, policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and journalists for evaluating the distribution and impacts of CAP spending.