Environmental and economic assessment of crops as a source of proteins under different production systems

The major purpose of this project is to provide an environmental and economic assessment of the introduction of protein crops in existing arable systems. As a pertinent environmental evaluation has to be based upon a systemic approach integrating time through crop rotation and ad hoc technical issues, this assessment will be conducted according to the following steps: i) identification and design of technical scenarios (soil type x crop rotation) adopted to a given region, ii) environmental evaluation based on an environmental balance on the duration of the crop rotation, iii) impact of different external economical scenarios such as world price of oil and grain, public subsidies... on farmers' decisions. This project is setup against the existing scientific and technical background, a review of the existing bottlenecks is proposed and these are identified in terms of scientific questions.