The Importance Of The Information Supplied By The Farm Accountancy Data Network In Preparing The Agricultural Policies - Case Study For Romania

At community level, the issue of establishing a Farm Accountancy Data Network (RICA in Romanian, FADN in English) within the agricultural holdings of the European Economic Community has been discussed starting with 1965. The development of Common Agricultural Policy requires the existence of objective and relevant information regarding the accounts of agricultural holdings as source for the supply of essential data regarding their economic activity. The information collected from the selected agricultural holdings must reflect the social, economic and technical conditions of the entity to be collected form individual holdings, to be available as soon as possible, to be based on uniform definitions submitted in a common form, so that they may be used at any time and with every detail by the Commission. For the accounting results to be homogeneous at the Community level, it is necessary to distribute the agricultural holdings with their own accounting records among different divisions and types of agricultural holdings based on a stratification of the observation field, based on Community typology. Therefore, on the data collected by this network are based the annual reports submitted to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe regarding the situation of agriculture and of the agricultural markets existent at the Community level. They start from a real basis being, on the one hand, an useful support tool for the measures of the Common Agricultural Policy, and, on the other hand, they allow the farmers to compare their own results with the average results of the agricultural holdings of a country.