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| Romania and the European Agriculture 03/05/2011 |
| (2011-05-03) |
| Last updated: 2011-05-04 13:56 EET |
Two decades after the fall of communism and the dismantling of the collective land management systems, Romania’s agriculture is still a lost bet. This is the reality, even though both Romanian and foreign analysts believe that it has the potential of being one of Romania’s development engines, as it happened in the inter-war period.
Romanian agriculture suffers from chronic diseases, which were diagnosed a long time ago: poor financing, scattering of land ownership, an aging labour force and the lack of a national safety program. It has actually been a subsistence-type agriculture and, since Romania joined the EU, Romanian farmers have not been delivered properly the European money they were entitled to.
These issues are regularly included in the agenda of the political tug of war between the power and the opposition, as it has recently happened in the Senate, where a simple motion on the precarious state of agriculture and of the Romanian state in general was debated. Far from the political turmoil in Bucharest, the European Commissioner for Agriculture, Romanian Dacian Ciolos, blames Romania for lacking a clear and unitary vision of the development of agriculture and rural areas.
In an interview to the daily Adevarul, Ciolos says that the lack of such vision translates into incoherence in financing projects aimed at meeting the real needs in the field. Dacian Ciolos also criticizes the unprofessional conduct of the Rural Development Payment Agency’s employees. He has stated that he had complaints about the eligibility criteria being modified after the publication of the call for projects, or the fact that some employees actually discourage applicants if they are not willing to work with specific consultancy companies. There have been cases, the commissioner states, in which people have been asked to give bribes for their projects in order to avoid their project being held too long in the processing stage.
In other words, there are ideas and money that would help Romanian agriculture and villages develop, but there are also corrupt employees. Despite hurdles, however, and although that rate is below the European average, absorption of structural funds for agriculture is above the national European fund absorption rate. Three years after accession, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary had an absorption rate of 20% as compared to Romania’s 2 to 3%, Dacian Ciolos also says. He warns that Romania runs the risk of paying to the EU budget more than it gets, because it is not capable of taking what is being offered.
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