Romania has around 700,000 farmers who annually submit a single application for area payment and only 76,000 of them are in a form of fiscal organization and produce for the market in an organized system, declared on Friday the Secretary of State in the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Emil Dumitru, at a conference on the subject.
"From the perspective of the structural gaps that Romanian agriculture is experiencing, and we all know what they are, I think it would be important to mention a few. Romania has around 700,000 farmers who annually submit a single application for area payment and out of 700,000 farmers, only 76,000 farmers are in a form of fiscal organization, who produce for the market in an organized system. Of course, we have taken steps, we have encouraged association, we have stimulated cooperatives, groups and producer organizations through all kinds of fiscal facilities, but we are still far from where we should be," Dumitru argued.
He stated that Romania is facing a very fragmented agricultural structure, given that the areas declared to the Payments and Intervention Agency for Agriculture are very small, only 1-2 hectares. At the same time, approximately 212,000 farmers submit payment applications annually, representing only about 30% of all farmers, and the area declared by them - 306,000 hectares - means a little over 3.2% of the total.
"These are structural deficiencies that should give us food for thought. I dare to verbalize them, because we are not in an electoral competition here, but rather to seek together, regardless of the political factor, to find consensus and to be able to definitively transform Romanian agriculture," the MADR official drew attention.
According to him, 1.7 billion euros have arrived in farmers' accounts for coupled support schemes, with another 256 million euros to be paid after the period in which farmers can submit documents ends, namely April 1.
In another vein, the MARD official referred to the crisis facing the European farmer, which is a profound one, but also the Romanian one, in the context in which, over the past few years, there have been all kinds of overlapping crises.
"I am referring to the Romanian farmer who had to receive prices, perhaps, below the world stock market quotations, because there was pressure with cereals from Ukraine, because we are on the border of the European Union and of course we have agreements including with the Republic of Moldova. But the most important thing I want to emphasize is that we hope that the islands of success that we have in the poultry sector, where Romania has a degree of self-sufficiency of over 119%, will not suffer as a result of unfair competition with products from Mercosur countries (...). That is why, somehow, we have to be careful, and about those safeguard clauses that have been circulating, I do not think that Europe can be prepared to trigger them at a distance, under the conditions in which there are some commercial contracts between various private partners. It should be left to "the latitude of member states to intervene and no longer allow the entry into the market of certain quantities of products that are the subject of the free trade agreement with Mercosur," the Secretary of State said.
Decision-makers from the agricultural sector, representatives of authorities and experts in economic policies gathered on Friday at the conference "Romania in the new global context - Economic, agricultural and trade opportunities and risks", organized by G4Food.ro and Economedia.ro.
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