May 15, 2025

For the past five years, the Centre de Recerca en Economia i Desenvolupament Agroalimentari (CREDA) has been one of the partner centres in the European NOVATERRA project, an initiative launched with the goal of reducing the use and negative impacts of plant protection products (PPPs), also known as pesticides, on vineyards and olive trees. Within the project, CREDA has been responsible for evaluating the acceptance of these products by various stakeholders, as well as consumers’ willingness to purchase and pay for wines and oils obtained with these alternative products.

Noah Larvoe, a PhD student at the centre and one of the colleagues involved in the project, explains where CREDA stands:

What is CREDA’s current status in the project?

Over the past few months, CREDA has been working on assessing the socioeconomic viability and market potential of sustainable alternatives. This includes analysing stakeholder acceptance, farmers’ cost-benefit analysis, and willingness to pay for the consumption of these wines and olive oils. In this regard, CREDA has collected evidence-based information to support the adoption and dissemination of these innovative practices. This information will also inform policy recommendations and promote market strategies to accelerate the transition to environmentally responsible agriculture.

In order to generate and analyse feedback from all stakeholders, CREDA’s team divided the reviews by audience type:

• Farmers: To understand their willingness to adopt alternatives to plant protection products, qualitative interviews were conducted to identify the stakeholders involved in the decisions. Farmers then responded to a survey based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour.
• Consumers: To assess their acceptance and willingness to pay, Discrete Choice Experiments were conducted for wine, and Contingent Valuation Methods for oil, which collected more than 5.000 responses.

Once the data was collected and analysed, the results were published and disseminated through international conferences and peer-reviewed journals. The ultimate goal is for policymakers, stakeholders, and the agri-food sector in general to adopt these results and support the broader application and scalability of the innovations to other fruit production sectors.