Overview

Business Risk Management (BRM) programming began in 1958 in Alberta, as a way to stabilize farm incomes. Now, as new environmental, social, and economic goals emerge for the agricultural sector, suggestions have been made that these goals should be linked to BRM support.

In the Federal/Provincial policy framework Going Forward II, the possibility of ‘cross-compliance’ was raised in relation to the support program AgriInvest: individual provinces or territories “may require participants to comply with certain criteria before they are eligible to receive government contributions under AgriInvest.” Those criteria were broadly defined to include traceability, the environment, business development, and innovation.

Dr. James Rude leads this one year project to study global examples of this sort of cross-compliance in action. Reviewing regulations from the EU, the US, and Quebec, he is developing a conceptual model to produce simulations that can quantify the potential impact of hypothetical AgriInvest cross-compliance on farms.

This will allow him to examine implication of hypothetical AgriInvest cross-compliance on other support programs, budgetary implications, and the impacts on welfare of agents in the sector.