Agriculture contributes over €170 billion to EU GDP, says Eurostat data
In 2020, the agricultural sector contributed an estimated €171.9 billion towards the EU’s GDP, the equivalent of 1.3% of the total.According to analysis from Eurostat, this was only slightly less than the GDP of Greece.
The agricultural industry in the EU created an estimated gross value added of €177.0 billion in 2020. One way of looking at this is that for every €1 spent on the cost of goods and services used in the production process, the farms in the EU created added value of €0.75.
The total value of agricultural production in 2020 was an estimated €411.8 billion, of which about half (52.8%) came from crops (including 14.0% from vegetables and horticultural plants and 11.2% from cereals) and just under two fifths (38.6%) from animals and animal products (including 13.1% from milk and 9.6% from pigs). The remainder was from agricultural services and inseparable non-agricultural activities.
Agricultural income per AWU for the EU as a whole was slightly lower in 2020 compared to 2019
Agricultural income per annual work unit (AWU) in the EU was an estimated 1.5% lower in 2020 than in 2019. This slight decline at the level of the EU included lower agricultural incomes in five of the seven largest agricultural producers: Italy (-4.9 %), the Netherlands (-5.1 %), France (-7.6 %), Romania (-13.8 %) and Germany (-14.6 %, this being the sharpest rate of decrease among Member States).
A majority of Member States, though, recorded increases in this index in 2020. The largest upturns were in Lithuania (+30.2 %), Croatia (+13.2 %), Spain (+13.0 %) and Hungary (+11.6 %).
Read the Statistics Explained article on Performance of the agricultural sector