Structural conditions of the sustainable intensification of agriculture in the regions of the European Union

Abstract

Sustainable intensification (SI), understood as an increase in resource productivity in the agricultural sector, achieved without harming the natural environment, is getting more and more attention from researchers and policy makers in the European Union. There is however still lack of the research, taking into account a dynamic perspective, structural features in a regional scope and social dimension of sustainability. To fill this research gap we used regional FADN data from the years 2004–2018 which were clustered using the latent profile analysis and Ward method. In the second step of the analysis we measured the intensity of SI process by the means of metafrontier Malmquist-Luenberger TFP Index and then to verify the hypothesis about the impact of structural features on the sustainable intensification process, a MANOVA analysis was applied. We identified four clusters of the regions, which differed in the structural features such as concentration, specialisation and orientation of the production in agricultural sector. They can be described as: 1) small farms with predominance of mixed type of production; 2) large farms with predominance of animal production; 3) post-communist, industrial farms; 4) small, unspecialised farms, highly polarised. SI assessment revealed that in the years 2005–2018 process was uneven, with particularly turbulent period of global financial crisis 2008–2013, after changes were more stable and positive. Furthermore, technological gap between the groups of regions decreased. On the other hand, in the whole analysed period cumulative productivity change was below one in all the clusters, what indicates that SI did not occur.