Competition for land use and sustainable farming in EU27: perspectives from the past and expectation for the future

This study was executed in a service contract with DG-Agriculture and generated many insights in how agricultural land use has evolved in the EU27 over the last 30 years and how it can evolve in the next 30 years. Agricultural land was analyzed in relation to changes in use and land management, competition, and, synergies of agriculture with other land use sectors and also between food, feed, energy, and non-food biomass production. In this contribution we will focus on presenting the results in relation to future land use developments in the context of the Green Deal (GD) and the Farm to Fork (F2F) strategy, and the potential impacts these may have for environmental key performance indicators (KPIs). Modelled land use changes for two scenarios show that by 2050 it can be expected that farmland area loss can be limited with active policy interventions to reach the F2F goals and broader Green Deal goals. However, if no active policy interventions take place, as modelled in the BAU scenario, the decline of farmland will be more than 8 Mha. In the two land use change scenarios the effects on KPIs such as for nitrogen emissions to water and air, GHG emissions, soil health, pesticides use, agricultural land abandonment, land take by built-up area and calories produced are different. They show diverse trade-offs in KPI scores between European regions. KPI scores confirm that in the scenario with active policy interventions towards F2F goals (SA scenario), the lowering of fertilizer and pesticides inputs, more organic land use, and lower livestock numbers, are likely to lead to better water quality, lower ammonia emissions, reduction in GHG emissions on agricultural lands, most strongly caused by reduction of enteric fermentation (livestock-based emissions) but not necessarily to GHG emissions related to land use shifts expected between 2020 and 2050.

The study makes several recommendations specific to the EU27 regional profiles. All the territorially different conditions intrinsically influence agricultural dynamics and drive territories to answer in a possibly different way to policy stimuli.