The Risk of Agricultural Land Abandonment as a Socioeconomic Challenge for the Development of Agriculture in the European Union

Abstract

In this article, the risk of agricultural farmland abandonment was assessed with the use of a synthetic measure of socioeconomic problems as challenges to the quality of life in rural areas in the European Union. To determine the direction and dynamics of changes in farmland abandonment in the EU countries, variables based on EUROSTAT and FADN data were analyzed using Hellwig’s method, and data for 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019 were compared. The EUROSTAT methodology for the agri-environmental indicator “risk of land abandonment” was adapted for the needs of this study. Agricultural land is abandoned for many reasons, including conversion to other uses, but also abandonment of farming. The results of the analysis indicate that the risk of farmland abandonment was highest in countries with difficult farming conditions, such as Greece, Spain, Portugal, Romania, and Finland. In turn, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, i.e., the most economically developed countries, were most resilient to this risk. An analysis of the factors that contribute to farmland abandonment demonstrated that the likelihood of this risk decreases with a rise in agricultural investments, farm income, population density, prices of agricultural land, road quality, and density. A high proportion of ageing farm owners was the only factor that increased the risk of agricultural land abandonment.

Sustainable rural development indicators in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Romania and the Netherlands: a review of data

“…Therefore, the abandonment of agricultural land is one of the major threats to sustainable land management, negatively affecting the quality of life, reducing agricultural incomes and increasing poverty. Sustainable land management should therefore be a key priority for the rural areas of the European Union (Pawlewicz and Pawlewicz, 2023).…”

The Impact of Long-Term Fallowing on the Yield and Quality of Winter Rape and Winter and Spring Wheat

“…Soil is fundamental to agricultural production [1]. Due to progressing urbanisation, industrialisation, and natural erosion, soil resources in Poland, in Europe, and around the world are constantly diminishing [2][3][4]. Much valuable land has ceased to be used agriculturally and is subject to uncontrollable overgrowth of perennial plants, which gradually turn into permanent shrubbery and tree stands [5][6][7][8].…”

“…The main tasks of this goal include combating desertification; regenerating degraded areas, including those affected by drought and floods; and creating a world that is neutral in terms of land degradation. The phenomena of agricultural land abandonment and the inappropriate management of fallow land have been identified as key threats to sound land management [3,9,10]. On the other hand, in an era of increasingly efficient agricultural production all over the world, yield surpluses are now obtainable under favourable conditions [11,12].…”

“…However, there are situations (e.g., political and economic transformations) where agriculturally valuable lands are excluded from production. External circumstances such as those in the 1990s, for example, left over 2 million ha in Poland and 40 million ha in the former USSR uncultivated [3,16,17]. It is estimated that there is currently at least 16 million ha of uncultivated land in Europe, which is considered marginal land, fallows, or abandoned agricultural land [18].…”

Assessing and mapping cropland abandonment risk in China

“…For example, the European Union developed 35 agri‐environmental indicators to monitor agri‐environmental issues at the national levels (Milenov et al, 2014; Schulte et al, 2019). Moreover, a CAR indicator, called “identification of the risk of Farmland abandonment” (Nr 14), calculated by national‐level statistical data and land use dataset, was included in agri‐environmental indicators (Pawlewicz & Pawlewicz, 2023; Chen, Tan, et al, 2023). This indicator index was successfully applied to evaluate the CAR in 27 European Union countries and provided valuable insights for reducing CA (Valujeva et al, 2022; Terres et al, 2015), which has also been adopted to conduct CAR studies in China at regional and county scale, such as in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, the mountainous areas of Chongqing (Chen, Tan, et al, 2023; Guo & Song, 2019; Su et al, 2022).…”