Miklós Vásáry

Sustainable agriculture: With or without subsidies?

A key goal in the 21st century is the provision of sufficient and safe food and other agricultural products, while reducing environmental degradation from agricultural production and enhancing the environmental benefits provided by agriculture, in the overall context of greater trade liberalization. In the EU it can be reach with the efficient use of decoupled direct payments related with cross compliance measurements. (Thomson, 2006) The recent CAP reforms principles was shaped the Comissions principle “Strong economic performance” that goes hand in hand with “the sustainable use of natural resources”. Therefore it is required to (1) promote the internalisation of environmental externalities in agriculture, make the transition towards full cost resource pricing, including environmental and social costs, and encourage the implementation of market-based and other policy instruments to enhance the provision of environmental benefits and reduce environmental damage from agriculture. (2) To promote a broader adoption of sustainable farming systems and environmentally sound farm management practices, including organic farming, by the majority of agricultural producers, paying special attention to ecologically vulnerable areas. (3) Integrate biodiversity and ecosystem concerns into agricultural policies and practices. To realize these aims, it must be phase out or reform those agricultural policies and subsidies that have environmentally damaging effects. But it is clear the direct payments have a reason for the existence: they are useful in common with the cross compliance to increase the efficiency of water use and irrigation systems in areas experiencing moderate or high water stress and to reduce nitrate leaching and run-off of nutrient loads from agriculture into water, lower the risk of soil erosion and reduce health and environmental risks from the use of pesticides.

Macroeconomic trends by the use of structural funds

The main goal of the European Unions regional policy is to reduce structural disparities between EU member states and regions. The balanced development throughout the EU can promote real equal opportunities for all. So the policy is based on the concept of solidarity and cohesion of economic and social conditions. It achieves this by means of a variety of financing operations, principally through the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund. The policy focuses on three main objectives, convergence – solidarity, regional competitiveness and employment and European territorial cooperation. By these objectives the EU supported projects in a wide range of areas – at regional and national level – from business support to urban development. It is very important that, these themes reflect the objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy to promote smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Between 2007 and 2013 for the European Unions regional policy is allocated 347 billion euro, 35.7% of the total EU budget for that period, just over 49 billion euro a year. All programmes are co-financed by the member countries the total available funding is almost 700billion euro, so the programmes and the results are and will be significant. The main programmes, eligible areas, and the beneficiaries of the national programs can be summarized, but to measure the various programs effectiveness, in the different countries, are much more complicated. The results depend on a lot of variables, for example the managerial institutional system, the structure of the national programs, the habitat of the participant and many obvious and potential, external and internal economical and social conditions. But despite of the dissimilarities, we try to collect, through some macroeconomical structural indicators, the main characteristic trends of the utilization EU sources. With various methods, we will characterize the coherence between gross domestic product, labour force statistics etc. Because the analysis of the 27 EU countries could be voluminous, it will be focused on some countries of Central and Eastern Europe.

The development of the agricultural production structure in the Visegrad Group

Introduction The agriculture in the four Visegrad Countries plays diverse role. In Hungary and Poland the share of agriculture in the national economy, external trade and in the employed civilian working population is higher than in Czech Republic and Slovakia. The structure of the holdings is also different in the examined countries. While in Czech Republic and Slovakia the bigger corporate and private farms prevail, till then in Hungary and Poland the most of the farms are private farms with smaller size. Besides this the structure of the production is important also. Inside of agriculture the share of the plant production 1 and the animal husbandry is determinative. The accession could change the function of the plant production and the animal husbandry primarily because of the direct payments and in the second place because of the high animal welfare and environmental protection rules. The authors primarily examined the function of the agriculture in the Visegrad Group and circumstantially analysed the relation between the plant production and the animal husbandry in the past 15 years.