The role of small farms in Romania and their future in the face of challenges of the CAP post 2013

Abstract

Small-sized farms have a significant share in Romania’s agriculture, as a result of the specificity of land restitution to former owners in the early 1990s. Although the total number of agricultural holdings in Romania was down by almost half a million in the last decade, from 4.48 million according to the 2002 census to 3.85 million according to the 2010 census, it remains one of the highest in the EU countries and reveals the social, subsistence character of a large part of agricultural holdings. As an average of the years 2007–2010, out of the 4 million holdings, only about one million were eligible for direct payments (those larger than one hectare). Out of these, more than 90% were holdings with less than 10 ha, owning about one-third of the areas for which direct payments were received. The paper attempts to evaluate the situation of small farm sector restructuring after applying Measure 141 referring to the support to semi-subsistence farms from NRDP 2007–2013 and the Life Annuity national scheme. At the same time, starting from the Commission’s proposal for the post-2013 period on the support to small farms under the form of a lump sum payment ranging from 500 to 1000 EUR, a series of calculation variants are made in order to see whether this measure would be financially attractive for small-sized farms in Romania. The main conclusion of the study could be that the process of small farm consolidation and their integration into the market economy structures would be quite slow, due to the extremely large number of small farms and to their safety net role for the extremely poor rural population, whose survival depends on the operation of the small plots of land under their ownership.