Some special aspects of agricultural efficiency in agriculture

Farkasné Fekete, Mária – Balyi, Zsolt – Szűcs, István

Keywords: total factor productivity, R&D activity, social capital, evaluation of agricultural land

Global agriculture is changing at an accelerated pace and is faced with ever changing new challenges from the supply and demand side alike. These changes also pose new challenges for researchers of this field. We have to seek new and innovative methods for increasing the efficiency of agricultural production, and these require increasing research and development expenses, and thus better effectiveness of these expenditures. It is the responsibility of research workers to draw attention to the dangers hidden in the global trends of agricultural R&D, especially to the consequences of the decline or stagnation of publicly funded R&D activities in high-income countries, and to the dynamics and characteristics of recent years. In order to measure the efficiency, methodological improve ments are needed both in production and in the field of R&D&I. There is no reliable and generally accepted method by which the efficiency of economic policy measures could be measured, when also taking into account criteria for sustainable development, as well as overall factor efficiency and the social efficiency of utilisation of the production factors.
In order to ensure the efficient use of natural resources it is necessary to use unified assessment, because under market conditions it is difficult or even impossible to assess a certain factor that has no expressed monetary value. The possibilities of increasing efficiency are increasingly sought after in the area of non-materialised production factors, for example in the fields of social capital, of knowledge and knowledge flows. Owing to the growing uncertainty of the natural, economic and social changes, the measurement and treatment of future risks are also of utmost importance from the point of view of efficiency.
This brief study only touches on a few aspects of the effectiveness of the agricultural economy. However, these also point out that the intensity of R&D activities and scientific-technical progress play a key role in improving efficiency and competitiveness. In Hungary, it must also be taken into account that the carrying (food provision) capacity of agriculture is primarily determined by the area of land available for food supply. We have 7.5 million hectares of cultivable area. Hungarian society can expect more from Hungarian agriculture than what the country’s physical barriers entail.

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