Agricultural sustainability in the European Union: a review of concepts, policies and economic perspectives

Earlier 2020 briefs identified annual growth rates for world population of 1.7 percent per year based on United Nations projections and per capita income growth in low- and middle-income economies of 2.9 percent as the major driving forces for growth in agricultural demand. These growth rates would probably result in a food demand increase of 2.5--3.0 percent, which should then be matched by agricultural production. Over the period 1970--90, production grew 2.3 percent annually, but most experts agree that major efforts will be needed to sustain a growth rate of about 2 percent in the future. Though most of this production growth will be realized within the regions, some food will have to be imported, and international trade will play an increasingly important role. Drawing on a recent study of European Union (EU) agriculture, this brief focuses on the EU-12 members in 1994 and discusses the consequences of possible further reforms of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on its agriculture and its potential as an agricultural exporter. The EU and CAP Reform Boosted by high support prices, EU agriculture is dynamic and productive. The EU is now a net exporter of cereals, meat, and milk products. This achievement comes with two problems: first, surpluses can only be deposed of by using export subsidies, leading to confrontations with other exporters; second, the high internal prices adopted by the EU to subsidize its exports and to support its farmers have led to steadily rising agricultural outlays in the budget. These pressures led to a reform of the CAP in 1992, which then paved the way for the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This new policy environment will change the position of the EU on the world market and open new opportunities. The EU is already a major player on world food markets. It is a large importer of coffee, tea, cacao, oilseeds, tropical fruits, and feedstuffs. Exports mainly consist of temperate products such as dairy, wheat, meat, and horticultural products. EU agriculture is characterized by high productivity per farmer and per hectare, and by high internal prices that are realized through high rates of protection on exports. Rates of protection on agricultural imports are virtually prohibitive, except on tropical products, fats and oils, and animal feeds such as protein feeds (cakes) and carbohydrates (corn gluten and cassava, for example). Tables 1 and 2 illustrate the EU's international role.

The uptake of organic farming is heterogeneous across the European Union (EU) and across farming systems. According to the 2020 agricultural census, at 14.8 million ha, the area under organic farming accounted for 9.1% of the total EU agricultural land, and close to 20% of the area under organic farming in the world. The EU’s Farm to Fork strategy, aims to have 25% of the EU’s agricultural land under organic farming by 2030.While the agricultural census from 2020 collected data on organic farming uptake by farming type, geospatial data was not available, so far. Disclosing census data at a more granular level is subject to confidentiality treatment as specified in the Implementing Regulation (EU) 2018/1091 on Integrated Farm Statistics (IFS). Confidentiality requirements on the frequency and dominance of farm holdings must be applied to map the data. Following the recent implementation of a methodology that accounts for these requirements, spatial mapping of the 2020 census became possible, providing an unprecedented view on EU agriculture. In addition, this also increases the number of data points available for analysis by up to three magnitudes.Using this data, we spatially map the shares of organic farming associated to permanent grasslands, green fodder, arable crops including cereals, and permanent crops such as fruit, olives, and vineyards. We quantify current levels and local uptake gaps, investigate which farming types are characterized by the largest share of organic farming, and identify the most important drivers of organic farming across the EU. To identify these drivers we distinguish natural factors such as physiography (soils), climate, but also socio-economic characteristics related to farm structure (e.g. farm physical and economic size, demography, labour), as derived from the new datasets. This is then compared to the commitment EU Member States have quantified up to 2028 in terms of the share of utilised agricultural area (UAA) supported by the Common Agricultural Policy for organic farming as part of the Performance Monitoring and Evaluation Framework.

This paper looks at the Cohesion Policy of the European Union (EU) and investigates how the EU agricultural and rural development policies shape its influence on regional growth. The analysis of the drivers of regional growth shows that the EU Regional Policy has a positive and significant influence on economic growth in all regions. However, its impact is stronger in the most economically advanced areas and is maximised when its expenditure is complemented by Rural Development and Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) funds. The top-down funding of the CAP seems to be able to concentrate some benefits in the most deprived areas. Conversely only the most dynamics rural areas are capable of leveraging on the bottom-up measures of the EU Rural Development Policy. This suggests that EU policy makers in all fields should constantly look for the best mix of bottom-up and top-down measures in order to tackle structural disadvantage.

The classification of agricultural and territorial systems is essential to improve the comparability of regions for the development programmers of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), to give new tools of intervention to policymakers and to increase farmers’ knowledge. Analysis of the principal characteristics of these systems is essential during a time in which the new CAP is being designed for the period 2021-2027. The research is focused on the analysis of the agricultural features of 228 regional areas (NUTS 2) of the 28 European Union (EU) countries. It considers two specific sets of environmental and socio-economic indicators provided by the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN). The main factors that differentiate agricultural systems in EU regions from one another were identified with the application of principal component analysis, while the classification of the same regions in homogeneous groups was carried out through hierarchical cluster analysis. The results clearly show that some groups of “homogeneous” EU regions such as the Natura 2000 area and the family-run agricultural system, which have weaker agricultural structures than the average of the 228 EU regions considered in this study, have a greater need for the restructuring of their agricultural systems than others (e.g., the professional agricultural system and the food industry system). The results confirm that policy design should not consider EU agriculture as a whole, but should take into account the environmental and structural specificities of agricultural holdings, as well as the different training levels of farm managers.

The expansion of the European Union (EU) to include Greece and Spain in 1981 and 1986 respectively led to an expansion of sectors protected under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which included cotton. In the subsequent decades, the EU's cotton policy has undergone several revamping attempts. By bringing cotton production and processing under the EU umbrella, EU policy makers admitted the role and significance of its production for the agriculture and economy of southern Europe. Nevertheless, the course of this policy has been highly contentious, and will probably remain so for years to come. This paper offers a retrospective view of the EU's cotton policy and then considers current and future perspectives of the cotton sector, as cotton, a commodity that is produced worldwide and a basic input for the textile and clothing industry, attracts the interest of both EU and world agriculture.

European Union (EU) agriculture produces food in sufficient quantity and quality, ensuring food security for EU citizens. Financial support mechanisms under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) guarantee affordability for consumers and decent incomes for farmers. In 2019. The European Green Deal (EGD) emphasized the importance of agriculture in climate protection. It set a new direction for change, putting EU farms at the center of sustainable food production. All this meant that existing agricultural practices in the EU allowed for high productivity, but also gave space for sustainable practices. The new financial support mechanisms under the CAP for 2023-2027 have focused on financing agricultural practices that protect the environment. The main purpose of the article is to discuss the future directions of agriculture in EU countries. Based on data on the agricultural sector in Poland, it is shown that an important direction of agricultural development is the digitization of farms and villages, which is a prerequisite for the introduction of precision farming practices. On the one hand, this allows to increase yields and reduce the consumption of natural resources, and in the long run increases productivity in agriculture. On the other hand, it facilitates the implementation of ESG reporting.

Few studies have been conducted to assess agricultural sustainability in the European Union (EU), and all of them fail to provide a holistic view of sustainability in a relevant temporal horizon that could effectively support the design of policies. In this paper, a composite indicator is constructed based on the geometric aggregation of 12 basic indicators measured yearly in the period 2004–2020 (17 years) on all EU countries plus United Kingdom, with weights determined endogenously according to the Benefit of Doubt (BoD) approach. Our composite indicator has a two-level hierarchical structure accounting for the contributions of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability. In our results, Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania and Poland are the countries with the strongest growth rate of sustainability, while countries reaching the 90th percentile of the score in sustainability include Austria, Czechia, Estonia, France, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Sweden. In overall, the social and the environmental dimensions have similar levels, while the level of the economic dimension is definitely higher. Interestingly, several countries with a high level of sustainability are characterized by a decline of the economic dimension, including Austria, Finland, Italy, Latvia and Slovakia. The reliability of our composite indicator is supported by the substantial agreement of sustainability scores with subsidies attributed by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Therefore, our proposal represents a valuable resource not only to monitor the progress of EU member countries towards sustainability objectives, but also to refine the scheme for the attribution of CAP subsidies in order to stimulate specific sustainable dimensions.

The glyphosate controversy before the renewal of the authorization of glyphosate in the European Union (EU) once again turned the spotlight on pesticide regulation in the EU. In the EU, pesticides are attracting more public attention than in other parts of the world, and many nongovernmental organizations specifically target pesticide regulation, trying to influence politicians and other decision makers. Following an overview of the EU pesticide legislation and the impact hitherto on EU agriculture, this paper outlines the glyphosate controversy and presents the outcome of desk studies conducted in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Sweden on the potential effects of a glyphosate ban on agricultural productivity and farm income. All studies concluded that the loss of income depends very much on farm type and cropping practice, but they all reached the conclusion that particularly no-tillage farming/conservation agriculture will be facing severe problems without glyphosate to control weeds and terminate cover crops. No-tillage/conservation agriculture is viewed as an effective strategy to prevent soil erosion and loss of nutrients, which could become larger problems without glyphosate. Other issues highlighted in the studies were the impact on resistance management, as glyphosate is largely seen as a “herbicide-resistance breaker.” Without glyphosate, fundamental changes in farming practices in the EU are required, and it is hard to imagine that they will come without a cost, at least in the short term.

Rural affairs have played a very prominent role in the economic and cultural life of Northern Ireland. With the exception of the Greater Belfast and Derry areas the region remains almost entirely rural. Within the European Union agricultural and rural policies have been a cornerstone (some might say a millstone) in the development of common policy frameworks. The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), including Structural Funds measures to promote rural development, remains by far the largest common policy programme in the EU: expenditure under CAP accounted for about 55 per cent of the total EU budget in 1996.1 Thus the CAP is a very important source of support for the region’s agricultural sector and rural society. It remains very much an agricultural support mechanism, indeed its primary goal in practice is to redistribute income in favour of farmers; over 90 per cent of CAP spending is for this purpose. The CAP has been rightly criticised for, among other things, the narrowness of its support and adverse distributional effects within agriculture, the large costs it imposes on EU consumers and taxpayers and for the price depressing effects it has had on the traditional markets of agricultural exporting nations such as New Zealand and Argentina.

Over the recent decades, the evolution of the European Union (EU) agricultural system has resulted in significant structural changes in member states. Knowledge about the nature and main patterns of structural change is critical to select a sustainable development path for the EU agriculture. This paper contributes to the academic discourse on structural changes in agriculture demonstrating the nexus between socio‐economic and environmental aspects of development. In this regard, results are important to understand the contribution of the EU agriculture to climate change, because study deals with energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The research covers period from 2008 to 2018 and investigates the fundamental structural change measures, namely, gross value added, labour and agriculture‐related energy emissions, in EU member states. Structural changes are investigated applying a shift‐share analysis that allows calculating a performance of individual member states, compared to the EU economy. The applied shift‐share model investigates the situation of individual member states employing three components. The first component tracks the development of the selected measures with the EU economy growth, the second component shows the change due to effect of economic activities and the third shows competitiveness of agriculture in member states. The shift‐share analysis empowers ranking member states in accordance with their progress towards the sustainable development. Findings suggest that EU economy faces the outflow of labour from agriculture and this trend is common for most countries. The changes of gross value added and emissions for fuel combustion demonstrate both upward and downward trends. However, research results suggest that new member states often face more fundamental changes.

The concept of sustainable development, which has emerged over the last few decades, has moved away from the global to the local level. The sustainability measurements at the global level use the triple bottom line, considering environmental, economic and social dimensions; however, the limited data available at the local level has driven what little research there is to use these optics when considering cities sustainability. In this paper, we use a sustainability city index based on the intellectual capital approach, which considers the three dimensions for European cities. Concretely, we use the environmental and social dimensions of this city index to analyze the effect of different levels of development in terms of sustainability over the main economic variables with available information. The results highlight the importance of the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability in cities economic recovery and show that cities with best positions in sustainability have better performance in economic terms.

In recent years, in the context of social, economic and environmental challenges in the European Union (EU) and worldwide, the concerns to support sustainable agri-food systems, such as organic farming, have acquired increasing importance. The main objective of this paper is to analyse the current situation and evolution of the organic production sector in EU agriculture and to identify the patterns of organic crops in arable land in the EU Member States. A mix of methods were used for the purpose of the research, which included: bibliographic documentation, comparative method, statistical analysis and multivariate interdependence analysis (principal component analysis and cluster analysis). The main conclusion that emerged is that organic agriculture in arable land in the EU is highly dispersed and diversified at regional/territorial level. Using the proposed methodology, the 27 Member States were grouped into six clusters/ homogeneous groups. The classification/ typologisation of Member States into homogeneous groups can represent an important approach for informing decision-makers for the design of strategies adapted to regional conditions/ specificity.

Recent publications by the Food and Agriculture Organization show the growing concern about the use of pesticides and the urgent need for sustainable agricultural practices. This study examines the relationship between economic development and pesticide use in the European Union (EU) within the framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) using a dynamic panel approach with the Arellano-Bond Generalized Method of Moments. The analysis of data from 26 EU Member States over a 20-year period confirms the EKC hypothesis: pesticide use initially increases with economic development, reaches a turning point at a Human Development Index of 0.865, and then decreases as human development progresses. Key determinants include education, investment in research and development, agricultural income and foreign direct investment. Our results confirm this relationship and underline the importance of policy interventions. Stricter enforcement of regulations, including pesticide reduction targets, and advances in agricultural technology are essential to accelerate the transition to less reliance on pesticides. In line with EU strategies such as the Farm to Fork initiative, this study emphasizes the role of human development, particularly education, but also the design of effective institutional mechanisms to reduce dependence on pesticides and reconcile economic progress with environmental sustainability.

In Brazil, agriculture has fulfilled its basic functions, being strongly linked to economic dynamics and food security. It has thus contributed to economic growth. In the European Union (EU) agriculture has played a prominent role which, after The Second World War, has unfolded in the formulation of a Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which has been mainly based on providing food security. The study is included in this context. It aims to measure the incentives of agricultural policy for cereal production in the Western Mesoregion of Paraná and the State of Nordrhein-Westfalen from 2005 to 2017. This was accomplished through an index, which measured the proportional participation of subsidies in the Gross Value Added (GVA) of agriculture in each region. The results showed that agricultural subsidies for Germany and Nordrhein-Westfalen were on average 29% of GVA. While for Paraná and West Mesoregion the value was around 8%. The result allows us to conclude that agricultural subsidies for the German regions were about three times higher than those of the Brazilian regions, demonstrating high participation of subsidies in the producer’s income.

Mixed farming systems as a way towards a more efficient use of nitrogen in European Union agriculture