Poland's Government Sets Aside Just 20 Cents per Person for Farm Research

Public money for farm science

Government budget allocations for research and development are classified by objective, and agriculture is one of them. This indicator reports what each Member State's government budgets for agricultural research, per inhabitant.

For the EU in 2025 the figure was 8.5 euro per person.

The distribution is very uneven and, unusually, does not follow the size of the agricultural sector it is meant to support.

The Netherlands and Denmark

The Netherlands records 28.1 euro per inhabitant and Denmark 20.4.

Both are small countries with intensive, export-oriented agriculture and long-established agricultural research institutions. The Dutch position sits with the rest of what this site records about Dutch farming. The Netherlands produces 39.3 billion euro of agricultural output, sixth in the Union, on a fraction of the land of the five countries above it; it records the third-highest ammonia emissions per hectare, behind only Malta and Cyprus, which are islands with very little farmland; and it now records the highest public research budget per head. Intensity, in the Dutch case, is a deliberately maintained condition rather than an accident of geography.

Bulgaria

Bulgaria records 18.1 euro per inhabitant, third in the Union, ahead of Germany, France and Italy.

This is the entry that prevents a simple reading. Bulgaria has one of the Union's least productive agricultural sectors — 13.3% of its workforce in agriculture producing 2.8% of value added — and one of its highest budget allocations for agricultural research per head.

A high research budget in a low-productivity sector is not a contradiction; it may be a response to exactly that condition. But it does mean this indicator cannot be read as a measure of how advanced a country's agriculture is, because the Member State ranked third would then be misplaced by any other measure.

The bottom

Poland records 0.2 euro per inhabitant, Romania 1.0, Luxembourg 1.2, Slovakia 1.6 and Portugal 2.0.

Poland is the striking case. It is the Union's fifth-largest agricultural producer by output value, with 45.3 billion euro of farm production in 2025 — declared below from the agricultural accounts rather than inferred — and it budgets 0.2 euro per inhabitant for agricultural research, a fortieth of the EU figure and a hundred and fortieth of the Dutch one.

Romania at 1.0 euro is in a comparable position: a large agricultural workforce, substantial output, and minimal public research budget.

What is being measured

These are budget allocations rather than expenditure, and they are government allocations rather than total research spending. Private agricultural research — by seed companies, machinery manufacturers and food processors — is not included, and it is substantial in several of the Member States that rank low here.

That is the main caution attached to this ranking. A country can have a well-funded agricultural research base that this indicator does not see, because the funding is private. What the indicator shows is the choice governments make about how much public money to direct at the problem.