exist, for example "Food for life," "Plants for the fu­ture,"   "Global animal health,"  "Forest-based sector technology."
•     The Joint Research Centre's (JRC's)/Institute for Pro­spective Technological Studies (IPTS). The mission of IPTS is to provide technico-economic analyses to sup­port European decision markers. It monitors and anal­yses  S&T related  developments, their  cross-sectoral impacts, interrelationships and implications for future policy development.
•     The European Science Foundation (ESF) which has in­troduced "Forward Looks" to enable Europe's scientific community, in interaction with policy makers, to de­velop medium to long-term views and analyses of future research developments with the aim of defining research agendas at national and European level.
•     The ForSociety which is a network where national fore­sight program managers coordinate their activities.
•     The Science and Technology Foresight Unit of the DG research whose missions are to promote cooperation in European foresight, to monitor and exploit foresight, informing European research policy developments and contributing to policy thinking in DG research, to im­plement S&T foresight activities, to promote foresight dissemination and experience sharing, and to prepare a foresight report. Studies are commissioned and expert groups meet. The Science and Technology Foresight Unit has commissioned studies such as "Converging Technologies. Shaping the Future of European Societ­ies" (Nordmann, 2004), the future of Key Research Ac­tors in the European Research Area (Akrich and Miller, 2007; http://cordis.europa.eu/foresight/home.html).
•     Different directions can launch foresight activities. For example, in 2007 the Standing Committee on Agricul­tural Research (SCAR) commissioned a Foresight food, rural and agrifutures (FFRAF) study which is presented below.

The    European    Parliamentary   Technology    Assessment (EPTA), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) all have foresight activities.
     The European Foresight Monitoring Network (EFMN) monitors ongoing and emerging foresight activities and dis­seminates information about these activities to a network of policy researchers and foresight practitioners. It supports the work of policy professionals at regional and national level. The EFMN is part of the European Foresight Knowl­edge Sharing Platform. It monitors and maps Foresight ac­tivities all over the world.
     The European Futures Observatory (EUFO) is a UK based not-for-profit company limited by guarantee, formed in October 2004, which aims to foster the development of a European School of Futures Studies. It is starting to carry out studies and has looked at the strategic futures that the US may encounter out to the year 2025.
     In Europe, a number of modeling exercises have been designed. The global economy-wide dimension is covered by the economic LEITAP model (a modified version of the global general equilibrium Global Trade Analysis Project,

GTAP, model) and the biophysical IMAGE model (devel­oped by MNP).
     ESIM (European Simulation Model) is providing more agricultural detail for the EU-25 countries. CAPRI has been developed by the University of Bonn and is a static partial equilibrium model with a dynamic recursive version to sim­ulate policies.
     WEMAC,  developed by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), in France, is a partial equilibrium model on crops that can make projections and simulations for cereals and oil crops in Europe.
     MEGAAF (modèle d'équilibre général de l'agriculture et de l'agroalimentaire français) is a general equilibrium model to simulate commercial policies for France and the rest of Europe.
     Three recent European foresight exercises represent dif­ferent approaches: Eururalis, Scenar 2020 and FFRAF (Fore­sight food, rural and agrifutures). Eururalis was launched with the aim to explore alternative future rural development options for EU-25 (Klijn and Vullings, 2005). This Dutch project is developing and analyzing a set of four long-term alternative scenarios to capture major uncertainties. Based on its success in providing sound information on future rural development options during the 2004 Dutch EU Presidency, an extended version of the Eururalis toolbox (no. 2.0) is under development. The new version will be used to analyze a number of specific rural policy questions for EU-25, in­cluding issues related to bioenergy and strategic options for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) after 2013 and the consequences on sustainability indicators. Such policy ques­tions can be posed for each of the four different world views, as developed in Eururalis 1.0, with regional differentiation and different time horizons: 2010, 2020 and 2030. The aim of the Eururalis toolbox is to help policy makers formulate long-term development strategies for rural areas in Europe (EU-25) (Box 5-1).
     Alternatively, Scenar 2020, a recent initiative of Euro­pean Commission, Directorate General for Agriculture, uses a baseline approach with varying policy options and partic­ular focus on the impact of technological change (especially information communication technology) and food chains on agriculture and rural areas (EC, 2007).This study aims to identify future trends and driving forces shaping the Eu­ropean agricultural and rural economy (EU-27 +) on a time horizon up to 2020. Analyses of trends from 1990 to 2005 provide the basis for developing a reference scenario (base­line) that represents a trend projection up to 2020. Three variants are constructed around the baseline: the baseline with modifications of current policies that are reasonably certain to happen, a "liberalization" scenario and a "re-gionalization" scenario. The latter two represent alternative policy frameworks with differing degrees of support to the agricultural sector. Drivers of change are grouped into those that are independent of policy influence (at least for the time horizon up to 2020) and those associated with agricultural and environmental policies (EC, 2007). In Scenar 2020, the spatially explicit land use model CLUE-s (Conversion of Land Use and its Effects) (Verburg et al., 2002) is used. The CLUE-s model disaggregates the outcomes of the ESIM-CAPRI-LEITAP/IMAGE suite of models to a temporal reso-