The reduction in the number of farms and farmers in the EU has attracted increasing attention in this EU legislative period. It has been a distinctive message of the Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski, who emphasised the ongoing decline in the number of farms in his confirmation hearing before the European Parliament in October 2019 and has regularly highlighted the issue, most recently in his address to the DG AGRI Agricultural Outlook conference last December. It has also been a consistent theme in debates in the European Parliament and in statements by farm group representatives.
I have previously posted on structural change in EU agriculture. For example, in this post, I discuss changes in the number of holdings between 2005 and 2020 and ask whether there is evidence that the rate of decline in the number of holdings has changed over time. My answer was that no clear answer emerged from the relatively short period examined in that post.… Read the rest