At the macro level, to assess the sustainability of agricultural land use, it is more
appropriate to use a "brief" system of indicators. This system includes a limited number
of indicators, which we developed for use in the development of macroeconomic
government programmes and national action plans for land protection. Table 11
identifies 26 basic ecological and economic indicators and their modifications,
quantitative values, dynamics.
According to the obtained data, it is clear that the level of agricultural land use
in Ukraine does not meet the conditions for sustainable development. Thus, in each
group, the number of indicators for certain problems having positive dynamics did not
exceed 50%. The exception is the group "Pollution of land and the environment.
Technological level", where the number of indicators that have a positive dynamics
relative to their total number in the group exceeds 75%.
However, it should be noted that the positive dynamics of indicators in this group
is due to a decrease in volumes of industrial production, rather than the introduction of
environmental production technologies.
One should also pay attention to the choice of the basic year, as it will determine
the dynamics of the indicators. Most indicators we correlate with the data of 1985.
Some indicators were compared to the data of 1990 and 2000 because of the lack of
data for 1985 (the degree of development of land resources, the level of tilled farmland,
meadow contaminated with harmful substances arable land) and because of the
incorrect comparison of cost factors, or other reasons (yield agriculture per 100
hectares of farmland, the level of employment in rural areas, industrial pollution of the
environment, emergency environmental situations, accident pollutants, the presence of
toxic industrial waste), or because of the impossibility of such a comparison at all.
The third methodological approach proposed by us, involves determining the
ranking of rural development in the country as a whole in order to identify the most
backward "depressed" from the point of view of the stability of agricultural land use
areas in order to allocate budget funds earmarked by the state more efficiently for the
ecological, socio-economic development of the countryside.
The data for 2006 and 2013 is presented in Tables 12 and 13.
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