Farm Fragmentation, Performance and Subsidies in the European Union
Résumé
Recent studies have shown that there exists a significant relationship between land fragmentation (LF) and farm performance. However, it has been difficult so far to precisely assess this relationship on a large scale because there does not exist to date a single database which would allow to measure, at the same time and for the same farm, both performance and fragmentation indicators at the individual level. LF has yet to be taken into account since differences in LF may indeed be a source of difference in productivity or efficiency among farms which may appear as equivalent on other grounds. Not taking LF into account would lead to spuriously attribute its impact either to the farmers’ ability or to other variables of interest such as public support. It was one objective of the FLINT project to fill this gap and to provide consistent both LF and technical, economic and environmental performance data in an operational and tractable way for a sample of more than one thousand farms across nine countries of the European Union. The proposed analysis shows that the small set of LF-related variables surveyed in the FLINT project allows deriving sound LF indicators and thus effectively investigating the benefits of taking LF into account in the study of farm performance drivers. It especially reveals that LF seems to be only loosely related to working conditions and quality of life indicators for the studied sample, and that most of the impact of total subsidies, and more specifically of decoupled payments, seems to come from the interaction with the average distance of farm plots.
Domaines
Sciences du Vivant [q-bio]
Origine : Accord explicite pour ce dépôt