On average, a resident of the European Union in 2023 spent 4,290 euros per year on food, drinks and dining in restaurants, roughly 108,000 crowns. Compared to the previous year, it was almost nine percent more.
The food industry is an important sector of the European economy. It employs approximately 4.8 million people in the European Union. Even more are employed by shops and restaurants, a total of approximately 17 million. And while abroad, small family farms predominate, Czech agriculture relies on large enterprises.
“The fact that we have some of the largest farms in the Union is a result of collectivization during the socialist era. Smaller farms were forcibly joined into single agricultural cooperatives,” agricultural analyst Petr Havel recalled the transformation of private farming into collective farming in the 1950s under the communist government in Czechoslovakia.
In most EU countries, on the contrary, almost two-thirds of farms have less than five hectares of land. Large enterprises are rather an exception – only about 3.6 percent of farms operate on more than one hundred hectares. The average farm in the Czech Republic has about 106 hectares, while the EU average is 17 hectares.
According to Havel, collectivization in communist Czechoslovakia in many cases broke people’s ties to the land, moreover, many of the original farmers did not return to agriculture after 1989. Slovakia or the Baltic states, for example, have a similar structure.
At the same time, large farms could have an advantage precisely because of their size. According to Havel, however, this was not confirmed in practice. “For example, farmers in Poland who farm on much smaller acreage are more competitive,” he pointed out.
European agriculture also solves another problem – the aging of farmers, i.e. owners or managers of farms. More than a third of them are over 65 years old, while only about 12 percent are under 40 years old. The problem also concerns the Czech Republic.
