Technical efficiency and environmental pressures of pig farms in Hungary
No hay miniatura disponible
Fecha
Título de la revista
ISSN de la revista
Título del volumen
Editor
Resumen
Descripción
Pig farming is one of the strongest polluters of water resources due to its intensive
production techniques and slurry rejection. Several European countries have already
introduced environmental regulations aiming at reducing the pollution caused by
nitrates from agricultural sources, but not yet Hungary.
This paper investigates how Hungarian pig farms would be affected if such
regulations are to be enforced.
We calculate farm technical efficiency separately for two types of pig production
systems – namely farrowing only and farrow-to-finish farms (FAFI farms) and
finishing only farms (FI farms) – using 2001 data on pig activity and Data
Envelopment Analysis (DEA). We then investigate whether environmental
regulations would affect the farms’ technical efficiency, with the help of a second-stage
regression and various environmental pressure proxies.
Results indicate that the pollution could be reduced with no impact on the output
level, and that Hungarian pig farmers have incentives to reduce nitrogen pollution in
order to increase their efficiency even in the absence of regulation.