The agriculture of an ultraperipherial region of European Union : the Azores archipelago

The Azores archipelago is considered to be an ultraperipheral region of European Union, because some of the characteristics of their development, and some specific politics were applied in these regions. A specific European development program, Azores Rural Development Plan – PRORURAL – for 2007 to 2013, is supported by the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development and is ongoing at this moment in Azores Archipelago. The objective of this paper is to characterize the type of agriculture curried out in the Azores Region. It starts by a small introduction of the Azores according to the Statistical National Institute (INE) and its brunch SREA – Statistics of Azorean Region - and finally by the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) Then it characterizes the agricultural farms and finally, it shows some relevant researches about Azorean farms, namely; (1) a classification of the Azorean farms and the type of objectives that can influence the decisionmaking of the Azoreans’ farmers (2) the efficiency of dairy farms and (3) the analysis of the impact in the incomes’ farmers. In the Azores, agriculture is based on dairy cattle productions and the remainder agricultural productions are residual. The Azores’ islands produce mainly cow’s milk (in 2010 it represented 30% of Portuguese milk production), but also beef. And there products comes from quite different production systems ranging from extensive to intensive grazing systems. The average agricultural area per farm is small (8.5 hectares) and the efficiency of the dairy farms is relatively low due in part to equipment amortization and is highly dependent of subsidies and - farms will not be economically sustainable if the subsidies were eliminated