<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

HAL
open science

# Should ‘Impartial’ Advice be a Priority of European Agricultural and Rural Policies?

Lee-ann Sutherland, Pierre Labarthe

► To cite this version:

Lee-ann Sutherland, Pierre Labarthe. Should ‘Impartial’ Advice be a Priority of European Agricultural and Rural Policies?. EuroChoices, 2022, 21 (1), pp.15-22. 10.1111/1746-692X.12348. hal-04054049

HAL Id: hal-04054049

https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-04054049

Submitted on 31 Mar 2023

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access
archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci-
entific research documents, whether they are pub-
lished or not. The documents may come from
teaching and research institutions in France or
abroad, or from public or private research centers.

L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est
destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents
scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non,
émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de
recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires
publics ou privés.

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
# Should ‘Impartial’ Advice be a Priority of European Agricultural and Rural Policies?

Le conseil ‘impartial’ doit-il être une priorité des politiques agricoles et rurales européennes ?

Sollte eine ‘unabhängige’ Beratung eine Priorität der europäischen Agrarpolitik und der Politik für den ländlichen Raum sein?

## Lee-Ann Sutherland and Pierre Labarthe

Recent EU legislation has encouraged Member States to ensure that advice provided to farmers utilising EU funding is ‘impartial’. According to the draft legislation from the European Commission (EC, 2018) for the new post-2020 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP):

'Member States should set farm advisory services for the purpose of improving the sustainable management and overall performance of agricultural holdings and rural businesses ... These farm advisory services should help farmers and other beneficiaries of CAP support to become more aware of the relationship between farm management and

land management on the one hand, and certain standards, requirements and information, including environmental and climate ones, on the other hand ... Member States should integrate advisors within the Agricultural Knowledge and Innovation Systems (AKIS) in order to be able to deliver up-to-date technological and scientific

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Farming organisations and cooperatives are often ‘linked’ to commercial companies: they undertake bulk buying of inputs in order to offer discounted prices to their membership; these farming organisations also offer advice on a range of topics.

© 2022 The Authors. *EuroChoices* published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Agricultural Economics Society and European Association of Agricultural Economists. This is an open access article under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

DOI: 10.1111/1746-692X.12348
information developed by research and
innovation ... [and] shall ensure that the
farm advice given is impartial and that
advisors have no conflict of interest'.
[Emphasis added]

Measure 13 of the CAP (2023–2027) similarly identifies both ‘independent’ and ‘impartial’ advice as critical to the sustainability of agriculture. At a superficial level, this new requirement seems a reasonable and laudable aim: to ensure that farmers have access to advice which is unbiased, particularly by commercial interests. Farmers are key actors in addressing climate change and environmental degradation, and need access to information on the impact of their activities. However, in the context of a highly diverse agricultural knowledge and innovation system (AKIS) this directive is quite challenging to achieve in practice.

In this article we synthesise the
results of an online workshop. The
aim of this workshop was to engage
international experts in critical
appraisal of the issue of independent
and impartial advice. It addressed
which types of advisory provider

can – or should – deliver
independent and impartial farm
advisory services, and whether this is
an appropriate objective for European
policies. These results highlight major
pitfalls for setting the boundaries of
impartial and independent advice.

How the study was undertaken

The online workshop entitled “The
‘Quest for the Holy Grail’ of
Independent and Impartial Advice for
Farmers” was held in spring 2020 as
part of the AgriLink project. AgriLink
was a ‘multi-actor’ project involving
academics, farming organisations,
consultancies and agricultural advisory
services from 15 European countries,
who specialise in agricultural
knowledge and innovation systems. An
open invitation was disseminated
widely to academics and advisory
practitioners, particularly to the
European Commission’s Standing
Committee on Agricultural Research. In
total, 24 people – primarily academics
who had undertaken research into
agricultural knowledge and innovation
systems (AKIS) – took part. Just over

half of these participants were from the
AgriLink project. Further participants
were primarily scholars from Europe,
but included academics from Australia,
India and North America. The panel
also included representatives of
farmers' unions, ministries of
agriculture, NGOs and suppliers of
advice. This panel represented a broad
range of expertise but cannot be
considered representative of all
perspectives on the issues discussed.

“Les participants à l’atelier en ligne ont contesté l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’accès à des conseils impartiaux était réellement une question importante.”

Participants were invited to register
and given access to a shared ‘Google
Doc’ with questions to which they

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Input and machinery suppliers are often the best source of up-to-date information on the products they sell.</figcaption></figure>
could respond in writing. These
questions were released gradually
over a one-month period, to
encourage participants to return to
the shared document, read others'
responses to their own statements,
and make further remarks on earlier
and newly released questions. An
online webinar was organised for 4
June 2020 to share findings. For the
purposes of the workshop, 'impartial
advice' was defined as advice that
was not biased towards a particular
product or services, whereas
'independent advice' was defined as
not associated with a commercial
product supply company.

During this workshop, preliminary
results of AgriLink's field work were
shared with participants. AgriLink
undertook the largest survey of
European farmers' sources of advice
in recent years, including interviews
with 1,080 farmers and 170 advisory
service suppliers. The farmers'
sample was purposive – participants
were selected who had adopted,
dropped or not adopted specific
innovations. Findings are thus
indicative of trends rather than
statistically representative. However,
the methodology included measures
to control for selection bias, by
comparing the sample with official
census through a set of variables
(e.g. the Gross Standard Production
of farms). The innovations studied
emphasised potential sustainability
transitions. Research began with a
farmers' survey, to identify the types
of advisory services they use when
deciding to adopt (or not) an
innovation, that is, the farmers'
'microAKIS' (Madureira et al.,
forthcoming). MicroAKIS are
knowledge systems that farmers
personally assemble. A survey of
these sources identified by farmers
was then conducted in a subset of
countries (Czechia, France, Greece,
Poland, Portugal, Spain, United
Kingdom). We interviewed all of the
types of advisors identified by farmer
participants in the initial study as
important sources (both advisors
linked to commercial companies and
independent advisors). This later
data collection enabled analysis of
the nature, organisational structure

and characteristics of services
provided by these various actors.

“Die Teilnehmenden des Online-Workshops stellten die Annahme in Frage, dass unparteiische Beratung tatsächlich ein wichtiges Thema sei.”

Findings from the AgriLink project about the role of ‘linked advisors’ in innovation uptake

The article of the CAP 2023–2027 (Art. 13) on impartial advice could be interpreted as the most recent attempt to reinvest in farm advice in Europe, following a trend of privatisation and commercialisation (Labarthe and Beck, this issue). Since the mid-1980s, a growing number of governments and commentators have taken the view that professional advice: a) should be provided by the market on a commercial and competitive basis; and b) that this is the best way to provide the responsiveness and flexibility of service provision to address the rapidly changing needs of farmers (Kidd et al., 2000). Most European countries have now switched from the direct provision of advice to farmers via government-funded organisations to various forms and degrees of commercialisation or privatisation (Table 1). However, these policies did not result in pure service markets where independent advisors would compete, but in much more complex configurations, using various combinations of public and privately funded services delivered by a diversity of public, private, farmer-based and other nongovernmental organisations. As demonstrated in Sutherland et al. (this issue), for many topics, particularly technological innovations but also new crop introduction and direct marketing, publicly funded bodies play very limited roles. With a

few exceptions, public private,
farmer-based and other
nongovernmental organisations offer
advice to farmers in all EU Member
States, but in different configurations.
For example, Poland continues to
have a strong, centralised publicly
funded advisory service, whereas the
public sector has completely
withdrawn from agricultural advisory
service provision in Denmark and
the Netherlands (Knierim et al.,
2017). At European scale,
privatisation has yielded an
incredibly complex advisory
landscape with a multiplicity of
sources of information and advice for
farmers to navigate, negotiate and
potentially act upon. The shift to
privatised advice has particular
implications for the meaning of
‘impartial and independent’ advice.

An initial step in AgriLink was to
develop an accurate typology of
suppliers of advice.

As demonstrated in Table 1, many of
these farm advice suppliers are not
independent but ‘linked’: they
provide professional advisory
services jointly with other activities
(including trade of inputs, outputs,
machinery, digital solutions). Field
research revealed a limited role and/
or availability of truly ‘independent’
advisors in many of the contexts and
case studies analysed (Madureira
et al., forthcoming). In contrast, in
many cases, ‘occasional’ advisors
(who do not have an official remit
for advice provision, but do so on an
ad hoc basis upon farmer request)
and ‘linked’ advisors play a very
important role in the knowledge
sources assembled by farmers to
support their innovation processes
(their ‘microAKIS’). Examples
include: input suppliers, nurseries
and seeds suppliers, machinery
dealers, high-tech companies,
bookkeepers, etc. Figure 1 below
reveals the diversity of suppliers
interviewed in AgriLink. It is not
possible to claim our sample is
representative as there is no official
census of advisors in Europe.
However, we selected advisory
suppliers based on farmers’
interviews and aimed at covering the
<table><caption>Table 1: A typology of farm advice suppliers based on the commodity (service and product)</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="4">Who owns/controls the advisory supplier?</th></tr><tr><th>Public sector</th><th>Farmers</th><th>Civil society<br>(NGO not controlled<br>by farmers or by<br>private firms)</th><th>Private capital</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td rowspan="5">What do the<br>suppliers<br>provide<br>(or sell) to<br>farmers?</td><td>Only advice and<br>training</td><td>Extension<br>organisations</td><td>Chambers of<br>agriculture, rings,<br>associations</td><td>NGOs, charities</td><td>Private independent<br>consultants/firms</td></tr><tr><td>Advice and Higher<br>education or<br>research</td><td>Universities,<br>vocational<br>schools</td><td>Applied research<br>institutes</td><td>Charities</td><td>Private research institutes,<br>R&D companies</td></tr><tr><td>Advice and Digital<br>Tech</td><td>Extension<br>organisations</td><td>Chambers of<br>agriculture, rings,<br>associations</td><td>NGOs, charities</td><td>Private independent<br>consultants/firms, SMEs,<br>start-ups...</td></tr><tr><td>Advice and<br>Bookkeeping or<br>other services</td><td>Extension<br>organisations</td><td>Chambers of<br>agriculture, rings,<br>associations</td><td></td><td>Bookkeepers, banks</td></tr><tr><td>Advice and<br>machinery</td><td></td><td>Rings, cooperatives</td><td></td><td>Private companies</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Advice and supply of<br>inputs or purchase<br>of outputs</td><td></td><td>Farmers'<br>cooperatives</td><td></td><td>Private firms and retailers</td></tr></tbody></table>

Source: AgriLink Deliverable D4.2 available at: https://www.agrilink2020.eu/work-packages/wp4. (Labarthe et al., 2021).

diversity of suppliers identified by farmers. The figure reveals the huge diversity of types of suppliers, and the important share of ‘linked’ advisors (bars in orange shades) compared to ‘independent’ advice suppliers (bars in blue shades).

Some of these actors were integrated into former CAP measures (e.g. accredited within the Farm Advisory System regulation) but it can be very difficult to assess how far they could be identified as ‘independent’, because of their multiple roles (e.g. farmers’ cooperatives that sell inputs to farmers and/or own a consultancy subsidiary company). Moreover, AgriLink research found that in some of the focus regions where the survey was implemented, there was a critical shortage of organisations which solely provided advisory services. Organisations providing advice typically had multiple, often commercial roles.

AgriLink results show that ‘linked’ advisors provide services that have very comparable features with services of ‘independent’ advisors. These similarities include the main method used (with a preference for one-to-one advice,

Figure 2) and proportion of staff engaged in back-office activities (Figure 3).

In other words, it is very difficult to differentiate between ‘linked’ and ‘independent’ advisory services based

on the features of the services they deliver. We presented these perspectives to the international experts who participated in the online workshop to open the debate on ‘independent and impartial’ advice.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1: A typology of farm advice suppliers interviewed in AgriLink based on who controls suppliers and the services or inputs they provide</figcaption></figure>

Note: X-Axis distinguishes the types of services or inputs provided to farmers. Y-Axis distinguishes between who controls the organisation. Z-Axis indicates the number of organisations surveyed in each type. Source: AgriLink advisory survey, n = 170.
## Outcomes of the online workshop

**Is 'partial' advice a problem?** Online workshop participants discussed the assumption embedded in EU policies that impartial advice was actually an important issue. Negative experiences with partial and linked advice were primarily attributed to input supply companies, who typically do not receive state supports.

Input companies often manipulate/ influence farmers to boost sales of their own products. In fact, they have a range of activities to promote their products. While it is good for them, they need to do it, but it is not necessarily in the interest of farmers.

Workshop participant, India

Even so, some participants argued that long term relationships between advisory suppliers and their customers built trust:

The most important advice for a farmer is often not impartial, but it is from a trustworthy source where there is a relationship that has been built over several years. ... they may be selling something but if the advice is unreliable the farmer will not return. Someone with a piece of paper indicating a certificate, might be independent but will the advice be reliable? The simple reality is that they will need to gain the trust and build the relationship with a farmer first before they are accepted as a legitimate and reliable source of advice.

Workshop participant, UK

Input suppliers are often the best experts on their particular products or technologies, and how these products can be expected to work in different situations. Some input suppliers are able to offer 'guarantees' or compensation if products do not work as expected, offering a form of insurance for their advice:

For example, farmers were purchasing 'bundled' services. The amount of nitrogen that was prescribed for a given corn seed in a given location was linked to

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 2: Distribution of advisory suppliers according to their preferred advisory method**</figcaption></figure>

Source: AgriLink advisory survey, n = 170.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /><figcaption>**Figure 3: Distribution of advisory suppliers according to the share or resources allocated to back-office activities**</figcaption></figure>

Source: AgriLink advisory survey, n = 170.

weed control prescriptions. Purchase of this suite of inputs carried an informal warranty provided to the farmer by the agrichemical dealer and/or the sales representative of the input firms. If the crop was disappointing, the farmer would receive some credit in the form of discounted inputs in the following year. These were long-term relationships and risk was shared through these relations.

Workshop participant, USA

Overall, the online workshop participants agreed that the trust held between farmers and suppliers was more important in farmers' choices than the apparent independence or impartiality of the advice. This is

supported by academic literature (e.g. Sutherland et al., 2013), and by empirical research in AgriLink showing how trust relations between farmers and 'linked' advisors developed.

**What is impartial advice? Does it exist?** Input suppliers and other commercial companies have a clear emphasis on product sales. Online workshop participants stated that the supply of advisory services has become so complex and fragmented in many European countries that it can be difficult to accurately identify the affiliations and links between advisors and commercial interests.

The heterogeneous development of advisory services across Europe has led to fragmented availability of advice on particular topics. Participants in the
online workshop argued that public advisors providing or selling only advice, who might typically be considered as more impartial, are very rare in many contexts:

In France, this is the debate at the moment. There will be a new law to have a strict separation between the commercial activity of pesticide trade and the activity of advising on plant protection. Whereas this law can be seen as going in the good direction, it raises many issues and debates. First, in certain French areas, it's not easy to find such advice, as, due to a decrease in public investments, most advice is provided by firms or farmers' cooperatives which incorporate pesticide sales in their activity. Moreover, many other actors might have an indirect interest in farmers' using pesticides or inputs (e.g. agri-food industry for technological quality of commodities).

Workshop participant, France

Key organisations providing farm advice in many European countries, such as farmers' cooperatives, are very hard to position in terms of 'impartial' or 'independent' advice. Farming organisations and cooperatives undertake bulk buying of inputs in order to offer discounted prices to their members; that is, there is a direct commercial relationship between these agricultural advisory organisations and commercial companies. These farming organisations also offer advice on the use of the products offered by commercial input supply companies. Advice is also supplied directly to farmers by purchasers of their commodities, in order to ensure adherence to procurement standards.

In addition, as one participant pointed out, all advice suppliers have an agenda of some form. 'Independent advisors' still need to meet their company's business objectives in order to stay in business;

charities have agendas for the advice they offer (e.g. improving agri-environmental actions), as do publicly funded advisory services, which have a mandate to address particular societal interests:

> I would argue that [advice suppliers] should be separate and unaffiliated from their own financial interests, whatever these may be. This isn't limited to their attachment to commercial companies. One of the big issues with agri-environmental grants in the UK is that farmers pay advisors to write the grants [applications] for them – this gives the advisors a strong incentive to put in applications which are likely to be successful, but are as little work for the farmer as possible i.e. these are not necessarily best for achieving the desired environmental outcomes. Particularly when we're looking at public goods, we need to look at how the advisor is incentivised.

Workshop participant, UK

Independent advisors may not be impartial; they often have a vested interest in particular outcomes. In addition, being apparently independent from industry does not necessarily ensure that advisors will emphasise public benefits and societal issues in the advice they provide. Moreover, some cases were reported where private independent consultants relied heavily on pesticide and seed companies to renew their back-office (e.g. to provide information and training on new inputs and standards).

## How can we manage the inevitability of 'partial' advice? A need for public policy to ensure the transparency of farm advice

Farmers can and will continue to seek advice from whom they see fit. Nevertheless, several participants suggested that a step that governments could take to

promote trust and boost impartiality amongst recipients of EU funding for advisory service provision was to increase the transparency of advice. Some countries achieve this by requiring advisors to sign declarations, or restricting employees of private companies from providing publicly funded advisory services.

In Estonia, the publicly funded individual advisory services cannot be provided by advisors who are employed by companies selling farm inputs (fertilisers etc.). The [legitimate] advisors have personal certificates, that they are competent. The forestry advisors are encouraged to sign the independence declaration that they work according to the needs of the client.

Workshop participant, Estonia

This is the approach that further countries (e.g. France) are aiming to take, but the entanglement of input suppliers with the farming organisations which provide advice make this problematic. Options for addressing this included maintaining or launching registers of accredited advisors and a clear monitoring of suppliers of services, not only at the level of individual advisors but also at the organisation level. In that respect, the European Regulation about 'Farm Advisory Systems' (see EC, 2010), which required all Member States to establish and maintain a Farm Advisory Service was seen as an important first step. Requiring advisors to demonstrate their professional competencies through certification was also an option, as was ensuring life-long learning of advisors through ongoing accreditation processes. Advisory services could also be made accountable for the solutions offered to their clients – a relationship already in action for some.

The lack of 'back office' support for advisory services is well established in the academic literature (Prager et al., 2016). This is particularly true for public goods, where there is limited research funding available to conduct
applied research to underpin
academic practice, and to transform
scientific findings into practical
actions. Investment in this area was
thus considered important by
workshop participants:

There should also be public invest-
ments in back-office activities to
guarantee the production of
reliable and relevant evidence,
through the maintenance of a
database about results of field
experiments, networks of demon-
stration farms, knowledge engineer-
ing to synthesise and translate
academic knowledge into practice,
etc.

Workshop participant, Greece

Well evidenced advice and
transparency

Examining the issue of impartial
advice demonstrates the
heterogeneity and complexity of
agricultural advisory service

“Online workshop participants challenged the assumption that impartial advice was actually an important issue.”

provision in the European Union.
New EU policies to address issues of
impartial advice are well-meaning
and address a legitimate issue. It
seems reasonable to prioritise
independent advisors in allocations
of public funding. However, it is
clear that mandates to enable
impartial advice are not
straightforward. Independent
advisors are not available in some
regions; neither are apparently
independent advisors necessarily
impartial. In certain contexts,
restricting policy measures to

'independent advisors' can even risk disrupting the provision of useful advice through farming organisations and other trusted providers who seek to offer multiple benefits to farmers. However, there is still an important role for public policies. The online workshop participants agreed that improving the quality of advice offered to farmers is an important policy aim. As described in the Parlons Graphiques article (Madureira et al., forthcoming), privatisation has not led to a noticeable fee-for-service market for independent advice. Workshop participants suggested that policy attention is better placed supporting well-evidenced advice, increased transparency, and ensuring qualified professionals are available to the full range of EU farmers, rather than on independence per se. How best to achieve ideals of impartial advice remains an important topic for debate.

Further Reading

EC (2010). *Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council on the application of the Farm Advisory System as defined in Article 12 and 13 of Council Regulation (EC) No. 73/2009, COM(2010) 665 final* (15.11.2010). European Commission, Brussels.

EC (2018). *Regulation of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing rules on support for strategic plans to be drawn up by Member States under the Common agricultural policy (CAP Strategic Plans) and financed by the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF) and by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), COM(2018) 392 final* (1.6.2018). European Commission, Brussels.

■ Kidd, A.D., Lamers, J.P.A., Ficarelli, P.P. and Hoffmann, V. (2000). Privatising agricultural extension: Caveat emptor. *Journal of Rural Studies*, **16**: 95-102.

■ Kinsella, J. (2018). Acknowledging hard to reach farmers: Cases from Ireland. *International Journal of Agricultural Extension, 6*: 61-69.

■ Knierim, A., Labarthe, P., Laurent, C., Prager, K., Kania, J., Madureira, L. and Ndah, T.H. (2017). Pluralism of agricultural advisory service providers - Facts and insights from Europe. *Journal of Rural Studies, 55*: 45-58.

■ Labarthe, P., Ansaloni, M., Laurent, L., Leloup, H., Nguyen, G., Noble, C., Sutherland, L.-A., Maiz, D., Zarokosta, E., Koutsouris, A., Madureira, L., Prazan, J., Sekowski, M., (2021). AgriLink - Deliverable D4.2 on 'Farm Advisory Regimes'.

■ Madureira, L., Marques, C.S., Santos, G. and Labarthe, P. Microscale Agriculture Knowledge and Innovation Systems (MicroAKIS): a new method to explore the heterogeneity of farm advice. *Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension, forthcoming*.

■ Prager, K., Labarthe, P., Caggiano, M. and Lorenzo-Arribas, A. (2016). How does commercialisation impact on the provision of farm advisory services? Evidence from Belgium, Italy, Ireland and the UK. *Land Use Policy, 52*: 329-344.

■ Sutherland, L.-A., Mills, J., Ingram, J., Burton, R.J.F., Dwyer, J. and Blackstock, K. (2013). Considering the source: Commercialisation and trust in agri-environmental information and advisory services in England. *Journal of Environmental Management, 118*: 96-105.

Lee-Ann Sutherland, Director of International Land Use Study Centre, The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland.

Email: **lee-ann.sutherland@button.ac.uk**

Pierre Labarthe, Directeur de recherche, INRAE, France.

Email: Pierre.labarthe@inrae.fr
# Summary

## Should ‘Impartial’ Advice be a Priority of European Agricultural and Rural Policies?

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

Recent EU legislation will require Member States to ensure that farm advice which is supported by EU funding is impartial. In this article we present the findings of an online workshop which asked whether this should be a priority for European advisory supports within the Common Agricultural Policy. The answer was 'no'. At the workshop, results of AgriLink were presented for discussion with international experts. These results highlighted major pitfalls for setting the boundaries of independent advice. Participants from Europe and North America agreed that 'impartial' advisors providing or selling only advice are rare in many contexts. Key organisations offering farm advice in many European countries, such as farmers' cooperatives, often have established relationships with commercial suppliers. Being apparently independent from industry is also not sufficient for ensuring that advice addresses societal issues. Farmers' choice for advice is more likely to reflect established trusted relationships than the 'impartiality' of the advisor. Workshop participants instead argued that policies should focus on increasing transparency (revealing vested interests); investing in 'back office' activities to ensure that advisors have access to reliable and relevant evidence; and ensuring that the full range of EU farmers have access to professional advice.

## Le conseil ‘impartial’ doit-il être une priorité des politiques agricoles et rurales européennes ?

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

La récente législation de l'Union européenne exigera des États membres qu'ils veillent à ce que les conseils aux agriculteurs soutenus par un financement de l'Union européenne soient impartiaux. Dans cet article, nous présentons les conclusions d'un atelier en ligne qui demandait si cela devait être une priorité pour les aides européennes au conseil dans le cadre de la politique agricole commune. La réponse a été négative. Lors de l'atelier, les résultats d'AgriLink ont été présentés pour discussion avec des experts internationaux. Ces résultats ont mis en évidence des écueils majeurs pour fixer les limites d'un conseil indépendant. Les participants d'Europe et d'Amérique du Nord ont convenu que les conseillers « impartiaux » fournissant ou vendant uniquement des conseils sont rares dans de nombreux contextes. Les principales organisations offrant des conseils agricoles dans de nombreux pays européens, telles que les coopératives agricoles, ont souvent établi des relations avec des fournisseurs commerciaux. Être apparemment indépendant de l'industrie n'est pas non plus suffisant pour s'assurer que les conseils abordent les questions sociétales. Le choix des agriculteurs en matière de conseils est plus susceptible de refléter des relations de confiance établies que l'impartialité du conseiller. Les participants à l'atelier ont plutôt fait valoir que les politiques devraient se concentrer sur l'augmentation de la transparence (révéler les intérêts acquis); investir dans des activités de « back office » pour garantir que les conseillers ont accès à des informations fiables et pertinentes; et veiller à ce que l'ensemble des agriculteurs de l'Union européenne aient accès à des conseils professionnels.

## Sollte eine ‘unabhängige’ Beratung eine Priorität der europäischen Agrarpolitik und der Politik für den ländlichen Raum sein?

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

Die jüngste EU-Gesetzgebung verpflichtet die Mitgliedstaaten, sicherzustellen, dass die mit EU-Mitteln geförderte landwirtschaftliche Beratung unabhängig ist. In diesem Artikel stellen wir die Ergebnisse eines Online-Workshops vor, bei dem die Frage gestellt wurde, ob dies eine Priorität für die europäische Beratungsförderung im Rahmen der Gemeinsamen Agrarpolitik sein sollte. Die Antwort lautete "Nein". Auf dem Workshop wurden die Ergebnisse von AgriLink zur Diskussion mit internationalen Experten vorgestellt. Diese Ergebnisse zeigten wichtige Fallstricke für die Festlegung der Grenzen der unabhängigen Beratung auf. Die Teilnehmenden aus Europa und Nordamerika waren sich einig, dass "unabhängig" Beratende, die nur Beratung anbieten oder verkaufen, in vielen Kontexten selten sind. Die wichtigsten Organisationen, die in vielen europäischen Ländern landwirtschaftliche Beratung anbieten, wie z. B. landwirtschaftliche Genossenschaften, haben oft Beziehungen zu kommerziellen Anbietern. Auch die scheinbare Unabhängigkeit von der Industrie reicht nicht aus, um sicherzustellen, dass die Beratung auf gesellschaftliche Fragen eingeht. Die Entscheidung der Landwirte und Landwirtinnen für eine Beratung spiegelt eher etablierte, vertrauensvolle Beziehungen wider als die "Unabhängigkeit" des Beratenden. Die Workshop-Teilnehmenden sprachen sich stattdessen dafür aus, dass sich die Politik auf die Erhöhung der Transparenz (Aufdeckung von Eigeninteressen) und auf Investitionen in "Backoffice"-Tätigkeiten konzentrieren sollte. Letzteres soll sicherstellen, dass die Beratenden Zugang zu verlässlichen und relevanten Erkenntnissen haben. Des Weiteren soll die Politik sich darauf konzentrieren, dass allen EU-Landwirten und Landwirtinnen ein Zugang zu professioneller Beratung gewährleistet wird.