Organic versus Conventional Farming—A Paradigm for the Sustainable Development of the European Countries

Abstract

Although organic farming is an important topic for society, at the European level there have been few achievements so far. Despite its constant increase, the demand for organic food in Europe is outweighing the development of this sector. As such, we aim to assess the interaction between conventional and organic agriculture, as well as their impact on the value of agricultural production at the European level. The main objective of this article is the assessment of the impact of organic farming, as compared with conventional agriculture, on sustainable development of European countries. Therefore, we used panel models based on data collected from the Eurostat database. We found that an increase of 1% of the organic farming areas will generate a contraction in agricultural production of 0.278%, whereas a 1% increase in the production of fertilizers would generate an increase of 0.260% in agriculture production. Moreover, an increase of 1% in the production of plant protection substances and in gross capital formation would generate increases of 0.1190% and 0.0933%, respectively, in agriculture production. The obtained results depend mainly on the characteristics of work on land, as some agricultural engineering methods (crop rotation, pest control, use of fertilizers etc.) influence productivity and production.