COMPARATIVE ASSESSMENT OF SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVENESS OF ORGANIC AND CONVENTIONAL FARMS IN THE BALTIC STATES: INTEGRATING ECONOMIC AND AGRI-ENVIRONMENTAL DIMENSIONS

Abstract

Agricultural policy requires farms to stay competitive while cutting their environmental burden, yet farm-level competitiveness is still assessed largely through economic indicators, leaving it unclear whether environmentally distinct systems differ in overall sustainable competitiveness. The purpose of this article is to compare the sustainable competitiveness of organic and conventional farms in the Baltic states and to reveal the economic and environmental dimensional trade-offs through which organic and conventional farms attain it. The farm sustainable competitiveness index was built on individual data for a pooled sample of 1,014 family farms from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia (2014–2016 and 2020–2022), analysed as a single regional dataset, using principal component analysis and equal-weight aggregation. No statistically significant differences were observed in organic and conventional farms’ sustainable competitiveness, but significant differences emerged in how the environmental and economic dimensions of the indices changed over time, showing a dimensional trade-off rather than the superiority of either system.