Support of Agrotourism in the Czech Republic Illustrated on the Case of South Bohemian Region

Abstract

Agro -tourism creates a basis for diversification of agricultural activities and for the rural development at all. In the Czech Republic there are about 500 farms oriented on agrotourism. The competitiveness of the agricultural sector in Europe is supported by the Common Agricultural Policy also in the programming period 2007 -2013. The activities for raising the global competitive advantages of European farmers are mainly based on the EAFRD Programme. In the Czech Republic the EAFRD implementation connected with the Rural Development Plan for the period 2007 -2013 contents also the Diversification of agricultural activities in its Axis III. The main aim of this axis is an emphasis on increasing economic growth, creating new job opportunities and sustainable economic development in rural areas. The diversification means here the improvement of used technologies (but not the raising of production), the start of finalizing food on farms, the offer of local goods, or the providing of services like agro -tourism.The article deals also with the question how will be this programme used in the South Bohemian Region. The analyses for this research work were carried out in the time period of May 2007 -September 2007 and they will show which activities will be preferred by the farmers, which amount of money will the farmers like to use from the programme in the budget period 2007 -2013, and which support would they like to get from the regional authorities like the Regional Agrarian Chamber with its advisors.

Impacts of Agritourism Revenues on Farm Incomes in 2004–2020 – The V4 Experience

“…The results of our analysis for non-V4 countries -including large, developed member states -are similar to Barbieri and Mshenga (2008) ad Bagi and Reeder (2012) about the USA, stating that for larger and more profitable farms the involvement in agritourism is associated with higher incomes. Regarding V4 countries, the general finding is that farms involved in agritourism are usually profitable (Roman and Grudzień, 2021;Kania and Bogusz, 2016;Roman, Roman and Prus, 2020;Habán, Macák and Otepka, 2012;Mura and Kljucnikov, 2018;Dömeová and Jindrová, 2011;Škodová Parmová and Dvořák, 2009;Kovács, 2020;Szabó, 2005), though most of these results refer to specific regions of particular countries and shorter time periods. However, this does not say anything about the importance of agritourism revenues within gross farm income.…”

“…Agritourism was also found to be profitable in specific regions of the V4 countries, empirical results exist for Poland (Roman and Grudzień, 2021;Kania and Bogusz, 2016;Roman, Roman and Prus, 2020), for Slovakia (Habán, Macák and Otepka, 2012;Mura and Kljucnikov, 2018), the Czech Republic (Dömeová and Jindrová, 2011;Škodová Parmová and Dvořák, 2009) and Hungary (Kovács, 2020;Szabó, 2005). However, these results are often based on particular areas, and analyse different economic indicators, in different years, therefore it is difficult to make a meaningful comparison between countries and farms.…”