European Union on the way towards sustainability in the domain of food security, improved nutrition, and sustainable agriculture

Abstract

Sustainable development was the global key issue and is in the interest of human beings. Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, goal 2 is significant in terms of eliminating hunger, achieving food security, and improving sustainable agriculture. The study aims to analyse the state, development, association, and convergence of indicators that are related to monitoring the European Union´s countries’ progress toward to Zero Hunger Goal. For analytical purposes, the univariate statistical approach was used, correlation analysis depicted the linear relationship between the variables, the sigma and Beta convergence coefficients were employed to detect the convergence progress, and the index numbers enabled to follow the changes of the indicators over time. The convergence of the agricultural factor income per annual efforts was discovered, which is a positive signal for the catching-up process of the EU countries. A positive and significant correlation between the government support for the research and development of agriculture and the agricultural factor income was determined, therefore an increase in the government support allocation for research and development for agriculture can lead to an increase of the agricultural income. The analysis highlighted a negative, significant correlation between the ammonia emissions from agriculture and the area under organic farming that supports the idea of increasing organic farming with benefits to the environment and population health. The study results can be used for further development of the EU’s ambitions toward sustainable agriculture and nutrition