Emission intensities in EU countriesʼ food production systems and their market resilience during the 2020 global economic turmoil

Abstract

One effect of the 2020 global pandemic was market turmoil over the food production system. Such strong market shocks can also affect the environment, for example, through changes in the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission intensity of production. The purpose of this study was to calculate and evaluate comparable GHG emission intensity indicators for food production systems and their production stages in European Union (EU) countries. An index decomposition analysis of the obtained indicators was conducted to determine the structural and intensity effects. The three original contributions of this analysis were index decomposition of emission intensity, consideration of more GHGs, and expansion of the study period to include 2018–2020. The results from the majority of countries confirm the research hypothesis that the emission intensity at the agricultural (on-farm) production stage in EU countries in 2020 increased in relation to the emission intensity of the remaining stages of the food production system. The overall emission intensity of food production systems increased from 0.83 CO2-eq per 1 GDP in PPP in 2019 to 0.86 in 2020. However, this was caused solely by the increase in emission intensity at the agricultural production stage, from 2.40 CO2-eq per 1 GDP in PPP to 2.65 in 2020. On average, emission intensity did not increase at other stages of the food production systems in EU countries. Our findings indicate the low market resilience of agriculture to the 2020 economic turmoil, causing the low market power of agricultural producers in relation to the remaining stages of the food production value chain. These results were confirmed by the higher intensity index and lower structural index between 2019 and 2020 in the majority of the analyzed countries, caused by the decline in the share of agriculture in the GDP structure of food production, with a simultaneous increase in its intensity over time.