![Angerer0002](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/Angerer0002.JPG)
The share of agriculture in Austria in the
Austrian economy declined steadily after
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...
,
agriculture
Agriculture or farming is the practice of cultivating plants and livestock. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that enabled people t ...
continues to represent an important element of the economy because of its social and political significance.
The Chamber of Agriculture remains on an equal level with the chambers of commerce and labor, although its members produce only a fraction of the
GDP
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced and sold (not resold) in a specific time period by countries. Due to its complex and subjective nature this measure is ofte ...
that industrial and commercial workers produce.
Production
Austria produced in 2018:
* 2.3 million tons of
sugar beet (the beet is used to manufacture
sugar and
ethanol
Ethanol (abbr. EtOH; also called ethyl alcohol, grain alcohol, drinking alcohol, or simply alcohol) is an organic compound. It is an alcohol with the chemical formula . Its formula can be also written as or (an ethyl group linked to a ...
);
* 2.1 million tons of
maize
Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. The ...
;
* 1.3 million tons of
wheat
Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...
;
* 697 thousand tons of
potato
The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae.
Wild potato species can be found from the southern Unit ...
;
* 695 thousand tons of
barley
Barley (''Hordeum vulgare''), a member of the grass family, is a major cereal grain grown in temperate climates globally. It was one of the first cultivated grains, particularly in Eurasia as early as 10,000 years ago. Globally 70% of barley p ...
;
* 387 thousand tons of
apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...
;
* 367 thousand tons of
grape
A grape is a fruit, botanically a berry, of the deciduous woody vines of the flowering plant genus '' Vitis''. Grapes are a non- climacteric type of fruit, generally occurring in clusters.
The cultivation of grapes began perhaps 8,000 years a ...
;
* 278 thousand tons of
triticale
Triticale (; × ''Triticosecale'') is a hybrid of wheat (''Triticum'') and rye (''Secale'') first bred in laboratories during the late 19th century in Scotland and Germany. Commercially available triticale is almost always a second-generation ...
;
* 184 thousand tons of
soybean
The soybean, soy bean, or soya bean (''Glycine max'') is a species of legume native to East Asia, widely grown for its edible bean, which has numerous uses.
Traditional unfermented food uses of soybeans include soy milk, from which tofu a ...
;
* 177 thousand tons of
rye (12th largest world producer);
* 132 thousand tons of
onion
An onion (''Allium cepa'' L., from Latin ''cepa'' meaning "onion"), also known as the bulb onion or common onion, is a vegetable that is the most widely cultivated species of the genus ''Allium''. The shallot is a botanical variety of the onio ...
;
* 120 thousand tons of
rapeseed
Rapeseed (''Brassica napus ''subsp.'' napus''), also known as rape, or oilseed rape, is a bright-yellow flowering member of the family Brassicaceae (mustard or cabbage family), cultivated mainly for its oil-rich seed, which naturally contains a ...
;
* 111 thousand tons of
pear
Pears are fruits produced and consumed around the world, growing on a tree and harvested in the Northern Hemisphere in late summer into October. The pear tree and shrub are a species of genus ''Pyrus'' , in the family Rosaceae, bearing the po ...
;
In addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products.
[Austria production in 2018, by FAO]
Government role
In
Austria
Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...
, as in most other eastern countries, the government has played an important role in agriculture since the end of War World II.
The government has concentrated on mitigating social, regional, economic, and even environmental consequences of the sector's decline, as well as delaying the decline itself.
Agricultural policy
Agricultural policy describes a set of laws relating to domestic agriculture and imports of foreign agricultural products. Governments usually implement agricultural policies with the goal of achieving a specific outcome in the domestic agricultu ...
has been carried out with different objectives and with different laws and policies depending on the times.
at the early post-war years, the most important objectives were survival and
self-sufficiency.
As a poor country, Austria needed to be able to feed itself if its population was to survive.
By the 1950s, however, the policy was changing to a more global perspective, while keeping intact the traditional
farm economy.
The government wanted to protect
domestic production, stabilize agricultural markets, protect farmers' incomes, and improve the sector's ability to compete in Austria and abroad.
Increasingly, the government began to believe in the importance of maintaining rural society as an objective in its own right, for social reasons, and to protect the environment and encourage
tourism
Tourism is travel for pleasure or business; also the theory and practice of touring, the business of attracting, accommodating, and entertaining tourists, and the business of operating tours. The World Tourism Organization defines tourism mor ...
.
Because of these aims, agricultural policy, more than any other
economic policy, reflects a mixture of economic and noneconomic objectives and concerns.
The principal aim, however, is to preserve the existing number of
farm
A farm (also called an agricultural holding) is an area of land that is devoted primarily to agricultural processes with the primary objective of producing food and other crops; it is the basic facility in food production. The name is used ...
s as much as possible.
Within the structure of the
social partnership
Social partnership ( ga, Pairtíocht sóisialta) is the term used for the tripartite, triennial national pay agreements reached in Ireland.
The process was initiated in 1987, following a period of high inflation and weak economic growth which le ...
, various organizations work to maintain farm incomes and thus farm existence, among them the
Grain Board, the
Dairy Board, and the
Livestock and Meat Commission.
These organizations set basic support prices, taking into account domestic costs and local
supply and demand, with only weak linkages to world
market price
A price is the (usually not negative) quantity of payment or compensation given by one party to another in return for goods or services. In some situations, the price of production has a different name. If the product is a "good" in the ...
s.
The boards and commission use a variety of measures to achieve their broad purposes.
Among these measures are
import restriction
Protectionism, sometimes referred to as trade protectionism, is the economic policy of restricting imports from other countries through methods such as tariffs on imported goods, import quotas, and a variety of other government regulations ...
s, such as
border controls and entry controls—some of which may be bilaterally negotiated—and variable import duties.
If import restrictions are not sufficient to maintain prices because of excess production, the
surplus is exported at subsidized prices (with the
subsidies
A subsidy or government incentive is a form of financial aid or support extended to an economic sector (business, or individual) generally with the aim of promoting economic and social policy. Although commonly extended from the government, the ter ...
usually coming from federal or provincial authorities).
Authorities also apply
production control Within supply chain management and manufacturing, production control is the activity of monitoring and controlling any particular production or operation. Production control is often run from a specific control room or operations room. With invento ...
s, such as sales quotas or limits, on the size and density of
livestock
Livestock are the domesticated animals raised in an agricultural setting to provide labor and produce diversified products for consumption such as meat, eggs, milk, fur, leather, and wool. The term is sometimes used to refer solely to animal ...
holdings.
Quotas exist for many different products, with the quotas usually fixed on the basis of past production.
Price and quality controls and limits also exist, especially with respect to different prices for different grades of
wheat
Wheat is a grass widely cultivated for its seed, a cereal grain that is a worldwide staple food. The many species of wheat together make up the genus ''Triticum'' ; the most widely grown is common wheat (''T. aestivum''). The archaeologi ...
or
milk
Milk is a white liquid food produced by the mammary glands of mammals. It is the primary source of nutrition for young mammals (including breastfed human infants) before they are able to digest solid food. Immune factors and immune-modula ...
.
The government can also pay direct income supplements, but these payments are generally restricted to certain
mountain farming zones and other equally disadvantaged areas.
Subsidies are mainly paid by the
federal government but may in some instances be paid by provincial governments.
Because of the complex system of price supports and
market access
In international trade, market access is a company's ability to enter a foreign market by selling its goods and services in another country. Market access is not the same as free trade, because market access is normally subject to conditions or req ...
limitations, the exact share of subsidy costs to the government and to consumers is virtually impossible to calculate.
Experts estimate that the total cost to the federal and other governments for agricultural and
forestry
Forestry is the science and craft of creating, managing, planting, using, conserving and repairing forests, woodlands, and associated resources for human and environmental benefits. Forestry is practiced in plantations and natural stands. ...
support during the late 1980s was approximately S16 billion a year, a level that would have been roughly at the same level as that of many other
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) governments but slightly higher than the
EC average.
The economic research institute
Österreichisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (WIFO) estimated after a major 1989 study that about 71 percent of the cost of
agricultural support was borne by consumers in the form of higher prices, with the taxpayers carrying the remaining 29 percent through such different programs as direct and indirect federal and provincial subsidies or various kinds of
market regulation.
Structure of agriculture
Despite the government's efforts to sustain agriculture, not one province had as much as 10 percent of the population involved in agriculture and forestry by 1991.
At the beginning of the 1970s, all but two provinces (
Vienna
en, Viennese
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, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
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, timezone = CET
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, timezone_DST ...
and
Vorarlberg
Vorarlberg ( , ; gsw, label= Vorarlbergisch, Vorarlbearg, , or ) is the westernmost state () of Austria. It has the second-smallest geographical area after Vienna and, although it also has the second-smallest population, it is the state with the ...
) had more than 10 percent of their populations involved in farming.
This contrasted markedly to the situation in 1934, when all but those same two provinces had more than 30 percent of their populations working in agriculture.
Over this period of two generations, the decline in the Austrian farm population was as fast as any in the Western world.
As of the early 1990s, of Austria's total area of almost 84,000 square kilometers, about 67,000 square kilometers was used for farming and forestry.
Roughly half of that area was
forest
A forest is an area of land dominated by trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, and ecological function. The United Nations' ...
, and the remainder was
arable land
Arable land (from the la, arabilis, "able to be ploughed") is any land capable of being ploughed and used to grow crops.''Oxford English Dictionary'', "arable, ''adj''. and ''n.''" Oxford University Press (Oxford), 2013. Alternatively, for th ...
and
pasture
Pasture (from the Latin ''pastus'', past participle of ''pascere'', "to feed") is land used for grazing. Pasture lands in the narrow sense are enclosed tracts of farmland, grazed by domesticated livestock, such as horses, cattle, sheep, or sw ...
.
Agriculture and forestry accounted for about 280,000 enterprises in 1986, with the average holding being about twenty-three hectares.
There were about 4,500 corporate farms.
Beyond those farms, however, only a third of all farmers were full-time farmers or farming companies.
Over half the farming enterprises were smaller than ten hectares; nearly 40 percent were smaller than five hectares.
Just as the number of farmers has long been in decline, so also has been the number of farms.
Family labor predominates, especially in mountainous areas and on smaller farms.
Only a third of all farm and forestry enterprises were classified as full-time occupations in 1986.
A full half of these enterprises are spare-time, that is, less than half of household labor is devoted to farming or forestry.
The remainder are part-time.
Farms up to ten hectares are more often tended by part-time and spare-time farmers rather than by full-time farmers.
For most farm owners and workers, nonfarm income is as important, if not more important, than farm income.
Despite the decline in the number of farmers and agriculture's share of GDP since 1960, agricultural output has risen.
As of the early 1990s, Austria was self-sufficient in all
cereals and
milk products as well as in
red meat
In gastronomy, red meat is commonly red when raw and a dark color after it is cooked, in contrast to white meat, which is pale in color before and after cooking. In culinary terms, only flesh from mammals or fowl (not fish) is classified as ...
. This gain was achieved because of the considerable gains in agricultural
labor productivity
Workforce productivity is the amount of goods and services that a group of workers produce in a given amount of time. It is one of several types of productivity that economists measure. Workforce productivity, often referred to as labor product ...
.
The value of agricultural and forestry output is heavily concentrated in
field crops,
meat, and
dairy products, with most of it coming from
animal husbandry.
Because large parts of Austria are mountainous, only the lowland areas of eastern Austria and some smaller flat portions of western and northern Austria are suitable for crop production and more intensive forms of animal husbandry.
The remainder of the land is used for forestry and less intensive animal husbandry, most of which takes advantage of mountain
pasturage
Pasture (from the Latin ''pastus'', past participle of ''pascere'', "to feed") is land used for grazing. Pasture lands in the narrow sense are enclosed tracts of farmland, grazed by domesticated livestock, such as horses, cattle, sheep, or swine ...
.
References
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Agriculture In Austria
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