欧洲未来十年将减少500万农民
Europe lost 5 million farmers in 10 years
5:00am Saturday 31st August 2013 in News
The latest EU statistical bulletin on agricultural economics makes depressing reading – nearly five million jobs disappeared during the first decade of the 21st century.
Although 25 million jobs remain, the majority of Europe’s farms are actually smallholdings employing, on average, only two people. Ten per cent of Europe’s farmers are aged over 65.
The EU Commission’s Agricultural Economic Brief says that in 2010 there were 12 million farms in the European Union. Nonetheless, most data sources tend to agree in saying that around 10 million persons are employed in agriculture, representing 5% of total employment. On the other hand, the Farm Structure Survey (FSS) indicates that 25 million people were regularly engaged in farm work in the EU during 2010.
These very different and somehow contradictory figures are explained by the special characteristics of agricultural employment but also by divergences in scope, methodologies and definitions. In particular, the FSS collects information about some categories of workers which are not included in other employment data sources, mainly family and part-time workers.
Effectively, in most EU countries the bulk of farm work is carried out by the holders and their family members (mainly their spouses): together, they account for 92.2% of those working on the farms, to very similar shares (46.6% for the holders, 45.6% for their family members). Hired non-family workers only represent 7.8% of those regularly working on the farms.
However, for many of the 25 million regularly working in agriculture, farm work only represents a minor activity: according to the FSS, more than half of them (13.8 million persons) spent less than 25% of their working time on farm work. Agriculture was a full-time activity for only 14.3% of them, being the main economic activity for a further 28.5% of the total (7.1 million persons).
As a result, when converted into full-time equivalent jobs (called annual working units or AWU in agriculture), these 25 million persons only represented 9.8 million AWU, which is close to the figures provided by other data sources1 and can therefore be considered a good estimate of the total number of people employed in agriculture in the EU. The share of family labour also became less important (77.5% of the total) when converted into AWU.
On average, there were 2 persons working on each farm (but less than 1 person when measured in full time equivalent). More than half (53%) were working on farms with a small economic size (reduced to 30.6% when converted into AWU).
Compared to the rest of the economy, men are in slight majority as they represent around 60% of total employment in agriculture (54% in the total economy).
The labour force in agriculture is also older than in the rest of the economy: in 2010, 33% of the agricultural labour force was younger than 40 years (44% for total employment), 57% was between 40 and 65 years (54% for total employment) and 10% was aged 65 years and more (compared to only 2% for total employment).
In the period 2000-2012, 4.8 million full-time jobs in the EU agriculture disappeared, 70% of them in the new MS and 93% corresponding to non-salaried workers.
http://www.smallholder.co.uk/news/10644573.Europe_lost_5_million_farmers_in_10_years/
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