2011 was a great year for Romanian agriculture, with grain yield growing by nearly 25% as compared to 2010, reaching almost 21 million tons. 2012, however, was a bad year, especially due to a severe summer drought. The total surface affected by the drought was over 3.7 million hectares, with maize and sunflower being the worst affected crops. The total maize output was only 5.4 million tons as compared to 11.7 million the previous year, while wheat production was around 5 million tons as compared to 7.1 million tons in 2011.

Romanian Agriculture Minister Daniel Constantin recently supplied information on 2013:

Daniel Constantin: “I can tell you that the agriculture budget is higher than in early 2012, but smaller in execution. Last year, as a difficult agricultural year, the government had to operate a significant correction for agriculture, to help those affected by the adverse weather conditions, more specifically by the drought, introducing a few new measures, such as giving some supplementary funds to people having 1 and 10 hectares under crop. On the other hand, people with over 10 hectares last year received record payments per unit of surface. This has been the highest payment they received since Romania’s EU accession in 2007.”

The minister went on to expand on the issue of payment per surface under crop:

Daniel Constantin: “Last year this payment had two components. The first one was 119 Euro, contributed by the European Commission, plus 35 Euro per hectare from the state budget. For this year, however, the European allocation is 139 Euro, and therefore Romania can lower its state contribution. Using the algorithm it imposed for accession, the European Commission has sets a ceiling of 27 Euro worth of additional allocation. That means 166 Euro compared to 154 Euro last year.”

Minister Daniel Constantin also talked about other projects:

Daniel Constantin: “We’ve talked every time about the need to restore the system of irrigations, we have a project ready, and now we are negotiating with the European Commission to allow for the irrigation, starting in early 2014, of 800,000 hectares in Romania, which needs about 1 billion Euro worth of cohesion funds. Also, a very significant amount out of the 2013 budget goes towards co-financing European funded projects. Last year we could have attracted more funds, given the efforts of the payment agencies. If I am not mistaken, 2.3 billion Euro went into Romanian agriculture in 2012, and I think we could have gotten more if there had been more money for co-financing. At the end of 2012, I think we could have attracted three to four million Euro more. For 2013 we were careful to set aside a significant amount for co-financing, almost half of the total agricultural budget, to make sure that we could attract at least 2.5- 2.6 billion Euro.”

Organic agriculture is in full development in Romania. Here is Minister Daniel Constantin talking about it:

Daniel Constantin: “As far as organic products are concerned, I think we have an extremely important export niche, but not very large. If in 2010 there were 3,000 registered organic farmers, today there are 26,000. This sector has had tremendous growth, which has been mainly achieved with European funds earmarked for this sector.”

Achim Irimescu, state secretary with the Agriculture Ministry, talked to us about Romanian farm and food exports:

Achim Irimescu: “It is very important for our products to be recognized and appreciated on EU markets, especially since Romania still has a negative trade balance in the farm and food sector. It is extremely important for Romania to come out on the European market, and not only, it should also make a presence on the Chinese or Russian markets, in order to compete with producers from other states, so that we could maintain the necessary level of competitiveness. The negative farm and food trade balance went down significantly, but we could also chalk this off to the economic crisis. 2012 was very bad for agriculture; because of the crisis it is more profitable to export than to sell on the domestic market, due to the foreign exchange rate, and so a lot of producers looked towards foreign markets. Exports went up overall, many of them of organic products.”

Let us also note that the Payment Agency for Rural Development and Fisheries has concluded financing contracts under the National Program for Rural Development for almost 65,000 investment projects in rural areas, with total non-reimbursable benefits of 5.2 billion Euro. Since the National Program for Rural Development was launched in 2008, the agency has processed almost 140,000 applications for financing, worth over 17.6 billion Euro. 68,115 projects were green lighted, worth 5.7 billion Euro, accounting for 77% of the total funds available under the National Program for Rural Development.

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