Economic Performance of SME Agricultural Producers in the Context of Risk Management: Focus on Visegrad 4 Member Countries

Abstract

The long term regulation of the EU agrarian sector via the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and its respective instruments focuses on the sustainable development both of the agriculture and rural area as a whole. It is needed above all to stress out the equalization instruments of CAP within the context of negative impacts' diminish of outer sectorial environment in relation with the economic status of agricultural businesses, specifically the small and medium ones. The EU programming period of years 2014-2020 is focused from the view point of the agrarian sector on more efficient CAP to encourage the competitiveness of European farmers. The aforementioned programming period is for agricultural producers from V4 countries the first one when CAP guarantees the maximum amount of operational subsidies for them, of course regarding the respective agreed EU accession treaties. Nevertheless, CAP subsidies cannot be considered to be the key factor of competitiveness within EU single market. The relation between long term increasing of production's inputs on one hand and the decreasing of agricultural producers' prices on the other one can be marked as very important negative aspect within the need of farmers' sustainable competitiveness. So, the direct consequence of a negative influence of aforementioned factor is the subsequent negative direct influence on profitability of agricultural producers. The need for increasing the efficiency of production, marketing and other related processing activities appears to be relevant and inevitable. The business processes are repeated cyclically, that is why there is emerged the need for its systematic and continuous management, measurement, assessment and subsequent changes and optimization. The management of risks has to be involved in the business activities of agricultural businesses regardless their economic size and branch, taking into account possible negative influences. The article aims at identification of instruments for measuring the sustainable economic performance of agricultural businesses via management of risks using secondary economic data. Subsequently, there are defined factors influencing the economic performance of SME agricultural producers settled in the V4 countries using the economic analysis. There are utilized secondary data of Eurostat and official EU documents.