Competitiveness of Family Farms in the Czech Republic in the Context of EU Common Agricultural Policy 2014

Highly regulated EU agricultural sector via Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) creates conditions for encouraging the competitiveness of farmers not only within the European single market. Farmers in the Czech Republic face not only the challenges of globalization, nevertheless the problem of aging the farmers’ population. Under provided major assumptions, there is therefore necessary to implement such instruments of the CAP to ensure sustainable competitiveness of Czech agricultural enterprises and specifically family farms by government authorities, which are considered to be the economically smallest agricultural business entities. There is introduced a specific approach to a more efficient CAP in the current EU programming period till year 2020 through efforts to increase the competitiveness of European farmers as well in the term of the sustainable development within rural areas. The objective of the article is to identify usable financial and nonfinancial instruments to increase the competitiveness of domestic family farms in the context of EU CAP 2020 not only in terms of the Czech agrarian sector, but within the EU single market. Complementarily, there is provided evidence to economic performance of the smallest farmers in comparison with other size categories of agricultural businesses in the EU member countries.