Final Report Summary - MEDFROL (Market and Trade Policies for Mediterranean Agriculture: the case of fruit/vegetable and olive oil) In recent years, the Mediterranean countries have encountered a number of agricultural policy changes that could significantly influence their agricultural sector and thus their overall economy. Since the EU is one of the major trade partners of the Mediterranean countries, EU Member States are faced with the ongoing trade liberalisation, the Reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU), and the establishment of a free trade area between the EU and the Mediterranean countries after 2010. The latter will be accomplished through the Euro-Mediterranean association agreements, which took place at the summit of Barcelona in 1995 and thus, is also known as the 'Barcelona process'. Ten years after its establishment, the Barcelona agreement was deemed to be up to date by 2005, the year of the Mediterranean, as it was declared by the European Commission. These changes have brought about the need to analyse on the one hand, the existing structure of the agricultural sector in the countries of the Mediterranean basin, and on the other hand, to empirically examine the impacts of the new policy regimes with appropriate modelling tools, so as to enable one to firstly evaluate the policies and propose further changes if needed and secondly, to base the discussion for the future of Mediterranean agriculture on sound empirical analysis. The MEDFROL project analysed the macroeconomic environment and the agricultural sector of the eleven Mediterranean, non-EU countries, namely Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Israel, Gaza Strip and West Bank, Jordan. These countries form a group of states that, despite their extensive heterogeneity, continue to share certain common characteristics, ranging from cultural and political status to overall economic situation. Moreover, the inclusion of four EU Member States (Greece, Spain, Malta and Cyprus) in the project, served not only as a form of comparison, but also as projectional case studies allowing for the assessment of the alternative possible effects of EU membership and the identification of any specific lessons learned by the Mediterranean countries. As part of the project, a number of actions were undertaken including the finalisation of the analytical reports on the general macroeconomic environment and the current state of agriculture with particular emphasis on the fruit, vegetable and olive sectors in the Mediterranean countries. Minor changes were made to the 13 homogeneous, well-structured national agricultural policy reports (NAPR) and 15 agricultural situation reports (ASR) and the final ones were placed on the MEDFROL website. The development and application of an input-output model aiming at the analysis of the generated impacts on national production, employment levels and household income arising from any future changes in the relevant policy scheme covering the fruit and vegetable and olive oil sectors. For this purpose, the latest available published I-O tables of Egypt and Morocco were used and adjusted according to the analysis. The diffusion of the project's work and major findings to a wide audience through the executive summary reports that were completed and placed in the website as well as the presentation of the results in international journals and conferences. Given that the comparative market analyses along with the policy implication analyses to be carried out during this project will only have an impact if they reach the main target groups, a dissemination plan was drawn up throughout the course of the project. Related documents Final Report - MEDFROL (Market and Trade Policies for Mediterranean Agriculture: the case of fruit/vegetable and olive oil)
