Agriculture and Forestry in Austria in the Context of the Bioeconomy

In agriculture, the situation in 2020 was not impacted from the COVID-19 crisis apart from short-term bottlenecks in seasonal work. Production and income increased slightly compared to 2019. In forestry, the situation was very unfavourable. Low prices reduced the incentive to harvest timber and much of the harvested volume was due to damages from drought and bark beetles. Agriculture and forestry are important elements of the bioeconomy. As a long-term comparison of the development of value added shows, it increased more in the downstream sectors than in the core sector, reducing the weight of the primary sector both in the value chains and in the national economy.