Inequality and Concentration in Farmland Production and Size: Regional Analysis for the European Union from 2010 to 2020

Abstract

According to Eurostat estimates, the overall number of farms in Europe declined of about 3 million units between 2010 and 2020. Parallel, the agricultural standard output increased from 304 billion to nearly 360 billion over the same period. Such evidence, legitimately leads to questions about how the structure (e.g., type of production and average size) of farms has changed and whether this change has been uniform or heterogeneous within Europe. In this paper, we aim at investigating the phenomenon of market concentration in the European agricultural and livestock farming industry from 2010 to 2020 at the regional level by exploiting the spatio-temporal dynamics of the Gini concentration index for the land owned by the European farmers and for their standard output. In particular, we are interested in exploring the variability within-and-between regions with regard to land and production size to assess if the European agricultural market suffered from an increasingly concentration of power in fewer but larger farm holding. The extensive mapping provided by this study may allow a fine spatial-scale socio-economic and political assessment of the European agricultural market integration process, its recent and future trends in the complex and uncertain post-COVID context and the restructuring of international relations due to crises and the green energy transition.