The Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat) reported in a recent publication that the number of agricultural holdings in the EU had decreased by 37% in the last 15 years, with which in 2020 there were barely 9.1 million ; that is, from 2005 to that last year they had decreased by 5.3 million.
This is how Euroganadería explains on its website. Some of the problems that are being seen and that explain this decrease may be:
- The aging of the population dedicated to this activity.
- Insufficient generational replacement to replace those who stop working in the agricultural sector due to age.
- Unstoppable mechanization and technification process, which requires less and less labor.
But Euroganadería also points to other, more illogical reasons:
- The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and its reforms, increasingly complex and excessively bureaucratic.
- Growing demands in the field of the environment and animal welfare of the strategies “From farm to table” or “Biodiversity” of the European Green Pact.
Other aspects for this considerable reduction in the area dedicated to agricultural exploitation would be:
- Drought
- Low prices/high production costs at source
- The Russian invasion of Ukraine
- The consequences of the Covid pandemic
