This report Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2017 is the 30th in the series of OECD reports that monitor and evaluate agricultural policies across countries, and the fifth report to include both OECD countries and a set of emerging economies. The present report includes countries from all six continents, including the 35 OECD countries and the six non-OECD EU member states, as well as eleven emerging economies: Brazil, People’s Republic of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Russian Federation, South Africa, Ukraine and Viet Nam.

Producer Support Estimate (PSE): The annual monetary value of gross transfers from consumers and taxpayers to agricultural producers, measured at the farm gate level, arising from policy measures that support agriculture, regardless of their nature, objectives or impacts on farm production or income. It includes market price support, budgetary payments and budget revenue foregone, i.e. gross transfers from consumers and taxpayers to agricultural producers arising from policy measures based on: current output, input use, area planted/animal numbers/receipts/incomes (current, non-current), and non-commodity criteria.

The present report is the 30th in the series of OECD reports that monitor and evaluate agricultural policies across countries. It includes the 35 OECD countries as well as the six non-OECD EU member states and eleven emerging and developing economies; overall the 52 countries covered by this report account for about two-thirds of global agricultural value added. While agricultural sectors differ across the countries covered in terms of their size, nature and importance to their overall economies, all face a number of common challenges and opportunities related to meeting future market demand. Policy packages need to be both effective and efficient to enable the sector to develop its full potential and achieve key public objectives. Countries share a number of goals for the sector: ensuring food and nutrition security; enabling producers to improve their living standards by operating in an open and transparent global trading system; promoting sustainable productivity growth and resource use; mitigation of and adaptation to climate change; building resilience to different risks; the provision of public goods and ecosystem services; and contributing to inclusive growth and development. They also have identified the need for an integrated approach to agriculture and food policies that is coherent with economy-wide policies.

The key economic and market developments which provide the framework for the implementation of agricultural policies are analysed in the first part of this chapter. Then the developments in the estimated support (using the OECD Producer Support Estimate methodology) are evaluated in terms of its level, composition and changes over time in OECD countries and the emerging economies included in this report. Within this part, highlights of the main recent changes and new initiatives in agricultural policies in 2016-17 in OECD countries and key emerging economies covered in this report are also presented. The chapter also focusesonchanges in the single commodity focus of support as support targeting individual agricultural commodities still represents the largest component of support to farmers. The chapter ends with assessment of support and policy reforms and related recommendations.

This chapter contains a snapshot view of agricultural policy developments in the countries covered in this report. A more comprehensive discussion is provided in the country chapters published online (http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/agr_pol-2017-en).