Romania: From subsistence to agribusiness

Especially since EU accession in 2007, Romania attracts foreign investors. Thirty EAF members visited the country and toured four large farms (3,000 to 6,500 ha) with foreign owners or shareholders. They found that management strategies and business concepts differed substantially.  Additionally, the group met and discussed agriculture with two Romanian farmers with respectively 900 and 1,500 ha. These also followed very different management routes. EAF also stopped-off at one of the largest grain and oilseed merchants in the country and Italian-owned. The visitors learnt that customer service is emphasised here, with raw materials mostly bought for the Italian market.

After 1990, families in Romania were awarded farmland according to number of members, the rule being one to two hectares per person, or five to 10 ha per family. With good connections, to local politicians for example, the land area per family could sometimes be doubled. No official land registry meant area entitlement of families was only registered per ha of total village area and not specifically according to field map. It was thus possible for the authorities to bundle families that did not wish to sell or rent their land into areas around the villages and offer the remaining outlying farmland as tenancies or freehold. In most cases this represented more than 75 % of the original village land area. The then existing LPGs (cooperative farms) and state farms mostly did not survive long. Within just a few years, nearly all were bankrupt. Food supply mostly came from domestic sources: nearly everyone in the countryside had gardens for food production and there was a lot of village-near land farmed under informal systems, grazing a few cows or steers or cropping with cultivations by older small-horsepower machinery.