Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
The classification is based on the situation of 1990; however, for Finland, Austria,
Eastern Germany and Sweden, the situation of 1995 is used.
4
Results
In this section we discuss the results of our testing of the three hypotheses.
Hypothesis 1 Farming in rural regions tends to be less intensive than farming in
urban regions.
Eight EU15 Member States appear to have regions in different types derived
from rurality. The fact that we cannot distinguish groups of most rural, intermediate
rural and most urban regions in all EU15 Member States is due to the relatively
high aggregation level of the FADN regions: there is only one FADN region in
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, whereas
Finland has only most rural regions. As we decided to compare farming intensity
to the national average, this implies that we can test the hypothesis in eight EU15
Member States. From these countries, the hypothesis is supported in Germany,
Spain Italy, Portugal and the UK and rejected in Greece, France and Sweden, both
in 1990 and 2003 (Table
8.1
). It appears that differences in farming intensity among
rural and urban regions are quite substantial in countries for which the hypothesis
is valid: usually farming intensity in most rural regions is about half the national
average, whereas that in most urban regions is often substantially above the
national average. On the other hand, in the three countries in which the hypothesis
is rejected, differences in farming intensity between rural and urban regions are
relatively moderate. Obviously, in these countries the degree of rurality does not
affect farming intensity to a large extent.
It could be wondered whether farming intensity at individual farm types differs
from that of the average of the regional farm, that is analysed in Table
8.1
. It appears
that individual farm types follow the pattern found for the regional average farm.
However, horticultural farms seem to be an exception to this pattern: in most countries
differences in farming intensity are relatively large among rural, intermediate and
urban regions, likely related to the predominantly occurrence of open field horticulture
in rural regions and that of greenhouse horticulture in urban regions.
Among countries, rather large differences in farming intensity exist. Farming
intensity is relatively low in Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Finland, Sweden and the UK
(about €800-1,300/ha in 2003) and rather high in Belgium (about €4,000/ha in
2003) and The Netherlands (over €9,700/ha in 2003) (Table
8.1
). These differences
reflect differences in the composition of agricultural production and in the use of in
biological and chemical technology.
4
Finland, Sweden and Austria entered the EU in 1995; for Eastern-Germany no data for 1990 were
available. As the share of LFA farms in the total number of farms is rather stable over time, the
typology is rather independent from the year on which it is based.
