The present and future of small farms in Romania

Small-sized farms have a significant share in Romania’s agriculture, as a result of the specificity of land restitution to former owners in early 1990s. Although the total number of agricultural holdings in Romania was down by almost half a million in the last decade, it remains one of the highest in the EU countries and reveals the social, subsistence character of a large part of agricultural holdings. 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 euro, 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 its 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 plot of land into ownership.