Croatian medium-term soft wheat market outlook

Abstract

With Croatia?s accession to the European Union (EU), numerous changes have taken place within the key agricultural markets. This primarily relates to the introduction of Common Agricultural Policy measures and instruments, the convergence of domestic agri-food product prices, the opening of the domestic market and the producer?s adjustment to the business conditions within the EU single market. Sophisticated tools such as partial equilibrium (PE) econometric models are commonly used in the impact assessments of the integration processes and for the development of medium-term market outlook simulations. The aim of this research is to develop a medium-term outlook of the soft wheat market in the Republic of Croatia up to 2030. As an appropriate tool, the AGMEMOD (PE) model was used to provide baseline simulations. The model results simulate future trends of main agrarian policy indicators (sown area, production, yield, import, export and average producer price) on the soft wheat market. The Croatian soft wheat market outlook assumes ceteris paribus market conditions with the existing agricultural policy structure until the end of the simulated period. The main findings of the simulated outlook indicate a slight growth trend of sown areas, continued growth of yield and production, along with soft wheat exports increase in Croatia by 2030 compared to 2018. Furthermore, the soft wheat degree of self-sufficiency in Croatia is expected to be 114% by the end of the simulated period.