Despite a decreased share of gross domestic product, the role of a country’s food and beverage industry cannot be underestimated. Food security should be a crucial part of national policy in every country because, during critical situations, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, it plays a key role in the protection of a country’s citizens. The food industry also plays a key role in employment and the sustainable development of all countries. We investigated the latest trends and focused on one specific branch of the food industry. Although the spirits industry does not have a major market share in the food industry, it is one of the branches with the highest added value, and it produces commodities with high export potential. This branch of the food industry in the Slovak Republic has a long tradition. Our primary aim was to examine the competitiveness of this sector in a single market of the EU as a key element of its sustainable development. The results obtained for the revealed comparative advantage suggest that there was a downturn in the number of competitive branches in the Slovak spirits industry during the study period of 2004–2018. Despite this negative trend, the remaining competitive branches of the Slovak spirits industry represent the majority of exports.

Distilleries for home fruit growers play an important role in the Slovak spirits industry. They represent from 5% to 15% of the total spirits production in the country. In this paper, businesses with a focus on waste management and its future potential were investigated. The investigated industry creates a significant amount of bio-waste when under 10% of raw materials used for the distillation process are transformed into the final product. The waste production in distilleries for home fruit growers based on the available annual production data was estimated in this research. Based on these estimations, distilleries for home fruit growers produce annually 37,407.07 tons of bio-waste on average. The median distillery produces annually around 211.4 tons of bio-waste. The bio-waste from investigated distilleries is used directly as fertilizer on the arable soil at this time. This option is the cheapest solution for distilleries for home fruit growers. The different reuse options for bio-waste from distilleries were compared. All of them were more expensive compared to direct use of bio-waste as a fertilizer. Due to the higher cost, there is no interest to reuse this significant amount of the bio-waste produced in small distilleries for home fruit growers at this moment.

The Slovak spirits industry has a stable position within the alcoholic beverages industry in the Slovak Republic. However, its production process causes significant environmental stress on nature. The industry can use roughly only 10% of the raw materials. This means a significant amount of waste is produced during the distillation process. We investigated the biogas production potential within the Slovak distilleries producing spirits for final consumption when we compared the production of spirits between the years 2010 and 2019. Biogas production potential is calculated as an ideal situation when all spent wash from spirits producing distilleries is used for biogas production. The potential energy gain is also calculated in kWh based on the already available research in the field of biogas production. We conducted that the total biogas potential of the Slovak spirits industry could reach 15,886,053 kWh in terms of electricity and 22,946,177 kWh in terms of heat energy if we calculate energy potential according to the spirits production in the year 2019. The total combined energy potential generated during the reuse of waste from distilleries could reach 38,832,230 kWh. The biogas production in these facilities has also a positive side effect. If distilleries use the heat energy for the distillation process, the amount of greenhouse emissions will also be declining.

This article is devoted to analysis of selected poverty indicators as measured by EU-Statistics on income and living conditions. Our orientation on these indicators underlines our focus on quantitative measurement. Spatial orientation was selected as the area of the Visegrad group countries serving as a research base for our investigation of poverty differences in the Central Europe. Further research is dedicated to Slovakia and its regions. In this article we aim to identify those quantitative poverty indicators that are responsible for poverty status of the most affected social group of people in the country.

Since its inception, the Common Agricultural Policy has been the largest among all common European policies. The main objective of the Common agricultural policy is food sovereignty in the European Union, stabilization of farmers' incomes and, at present, support for non-production functions of agriculture and environmental protection. Given the rising input prices and the time mismatch between supply and demand for agricultural products, the first pillar of the CAP has become a key tool for sustaining the desired competitiveness of agricultural products in the EU Member States. Direct payments have become an important tool for Slovak farmers, and therefore their effective implementation is essential for their continued existence or development. The aim of the paper was to point out the weak enforceability of direct payments to eligible users of agricultural land if there is a conflicting legal entitlement to provide a direct payment in accordance with §28 and §29 of Act no. 280/2017 Coll. and the resulting problems for eligible applicants.