New Internet service reveals large variation in the profitability of agriculture in the EU

Advanced key figures provided by the new Internet service reveal large variation in the profitability of agriculture between EU Member States. Agriculture is most profitable in some new EU Member States and least profitable in certain Scandinavian countries.

According to the key figure for profitability ratio EU agricultural profitability improved slightly during the period 1989–2004, but overall is still not particularly profitable. On average, the larger the farms, the better the profitability. The solvency of agricultural enterprises is excellent throughout the EU.

Thousands of reports via internet

The Internet service contains the advanced key figures and three reports for Member States for accounting years 1989–2004. Under “Own criteria” users can select classifiers to generate their chosen key figure reports. Three reports are available: entrepreneur’s profit, profitability ratio, and return on assets. The classifiers are: accounting year, member state, FADN region, economic size class, organic production, least favoured area, and five different production type classification variables. From two to five classifiers may be selected per report.

The user selects the report and the classifiers to be used, and the service generates tables dynamically on the basis of these selections. Several thousands of reports can easily be generated for comparing profitability and solvency of agricultural enterprises in Member States.

The key figures, calculated by MTT, are based on data files downloadable from the public Internet site of the EU DG AGRI. G.3. (http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/rica/). For 2004 the FADN database covers 74,000 farms across the EU, and their weighted results are representative of the 4 million farm enterprises for that year. The EconomyDoctor FADN Advanced Results Internet service containing all the key figures is available in English at www.mtt.fi/eufadn-adv