Farming Standards as a Catalyst of Green Agriculture and Food Export: Middle Income European countries Case Study

IFA GLOBALG.A.P. is a leading private and voluntary standard for sustainable agriculture in all countries worldwide. Its implementation and certification are increasingly becoming a prerequisite for exporting food and vegetables to the EU countries and other high-income markets. The aim of the paper is to examine whether farmers’ progress in terms of sustainable agriculture and implementation of the IFA GLOBALG.A.P. standard in 13 middle-income European countries can represent a “catalyst” which improves the export performance of these national economies in the sector of agriculture. The export performance was represented by the following criterion variables: (a) annual values of fruit and vegetable export, US dollar thousand; (b) annual values of fruit and vegetable export to high-income importing markets, US dollar thousand and (c) the percentage share of food and vegetable export to high-income markets in the total food and vegetable export. The predictor variable was defined as the number of IFA GLOBALG.A.P. certified farmers. All variables were presented per country and per year. The research included the period from 2010 to 2021, while the hypotheses were tested using the panel regression analysis. Individual models were tested for each criterion variable, and all three models were adequate. The results show that the rise of the number of IFA GLOBALG.A.P. certified producers leads to the increase in the values of all three studied criterion variables. The obtained results complement and enrich the scarce academic literature in this field related to developing countries in Europe. In addition, the research offers guidelines and recommendations for directing national policies towards greater implementation of private and voluntary farm certification schemes for sustainable agriculture.