Territorial Clusters of Farmers' Interest in Diversification in Poland: Geospatial Location and Characteristics

With a gradual shift towards sustainable rural development, farm diversification has recently gained importance in EU policy. To increase the efficiency of policies aiming to support farm diversification, it is of crucial importance to know the factors motivating farmers to diversify. The purpose of this paper was to research spatial determinants of farm diversification in Poland by identifying and describing territorial clusters of rural areas (municipalities), in which farmers' interest in diversification is above or below the national average. The Moran's global spatial autocorrelation coefficient was used to test for spatial autocorrelation, while the local Moran's statistic served to group together municipalities which exhibited a level of the frequency of applying for diversification support above/below the average value for the entire territory covered by the analysis. Furthermore, the clusters were described with the use of synthetic characteristics of the Polish agriculture and rural areas. The existence and characteristics of clusters suggest that the policy toward diversification in Poland favors areas of better developed agricultural structures. In clusters with structural disadvantages where diversification is most needed, the program's performance has been very modest. However, our analysis also revealed the existence of outlier municipalities which demonstrated outstanding performance in applying for diversification funds despite structural disadvantages. These observations suggest that the farmers' interest in diversification may be driven by a number of additional factors beyond a structural disadvantage alone.