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Ernährungssicherung und Klimawandel: Die Rolle nachhaltiger Intensivierung, die Bedeutung der Betriebsgröße und die GAP
Author(s) -
Rickard Sean
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
eurochoices
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.487
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1746-692X
pISSN - 1478-0917
DOI - 10.1111/1746-692x.12082
Subject(s) - food security , trilemma , natural resource economics , agriculture , investment (military) , business , economics , climate change , natural resource , productivity , scale (ratio) , capital (architecture) , agricultural economics , monetary economics , economic growth , ecology , physics , history , archaeology , quantum mechanics , politics , political science , law , biology , monetary policy
Summary Food security, the depletion of the world's natural capital and climate change form a trilemma for EU agriculture. This article argues that while reducing food waste and meat consumption can make a contribution, only the widespread adoption of sustainable intensification ( SI ) – to achieve a step‐change in natural resource productivity ( NRP ) growth – can deliver the necessary increase in output while reducing the industry's demands on the environment and GHG emissions. Maximising the growth of NRP depends not only on advances in plant and animal breeding but also a general transition to precision farming. This transition critically involves expensive investment and in this respect, larger‐scale farms that benefit from economies of scale have an inherent advantage: they are more likely to be profitable, have greater access to investment funds and also a larger volume of output over which to spread the cost. Within the EU , production is only slowly being concentrated on larger‐scale farms and for approximately two thirds of farms, direct support payments serve only to augment incomes and are insufficient to generate a surplus to fund performance improving investment. Phasing out direct payments would speed‐up the EU agricultural industry's rate of structural change thereby helping it more rapidly to address the trilemma while minimising the impact on food prices.