Abstract
In the last two completed periods of the Common Agricultural Policy implementation, the support for sustainability of agricultural holdings has been one of the main objectives and a subject of wide academic discussions.
Support guidelines are often not based on a specific production intensity per unit area and the farms from different specializations suffer from related inequalities and in particular from differentiations in payments that are (not) taken into account by the European Commission. Those circumstances model the contrast of sustainability levels between the different types of farms observed in this study.
Considered as most sustainable, the field crop farms are represented in order the specialized wine, fruit and vegetable production units to be compared and to be found if they are into a vulnerable position in economic, social and environmental terms.
The method used for farm sustainability estimation is Relative Comparative Assessment, which uses data normalization to create the single indicator scores. After the averaging of all 15 variables covering main sustainability dimensions – economic, social and environmental, the sustainability indices are formed.
In the field crops sector six Member States achieved sustainability rates above the EU farm average: Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Austria, Finland and Ireland, while this is accurate for three representatives of permanent crops – Spain, Austria and again Italy, the only unit in the viticulture sector. There is none in the horticulture sector.
Keywords: CAP, Farm Sustainability, Field crops, Horticulture, Permanent crops, Viticulture Introduction