The Romanian Farmers Club and the Romanian National Potato Federation propose to the authorities the implementation of a National Strategic Potato Plan, to save an economic sector in great difficulty and harmonise the trade balance, which now registers a deficit of 50-60 pct, the representatives of the two organizations say.
The main limiting factors in Romanian potato cultivation are the excessive fragmentation of te land, often low technical level, small size agricultural holdings, poor quality of seeding material and above all lack of adequate storage space.
“Country should hold the second place at European level in terms of the arable area for potato cultivation, but the low yield and lack of individual warehouses of the Romanian farmers cannot give us this prestigious position in the continental ranking. Unfortunately, Romanian potato producers have to sell their production immediately afte”r harvest at low prices, due to the lack of storage space in optimal conditions throughout the year. In this way, massive potato imports take place in our country every year,” said Laszlo Becsek, vice-president of the Romanian Farmers Club.
From time immemorial, the people here have been growing all manner of vegetables, including cabbages, tomatoes and red beet, on just a few hectares, and milking their cows by hand. The poultry are free to roam the farms as they please. It is estimated that a third of the food consumed in Romania is produced by small-scale, family-run farms, using minimal equipment and a lot of muscle power – and bypassing commercial trading outlets. Instead of ending up barcoded and wrapped in plastic on supermarket shelves, the country’s harvest is sold on markets, daringly piled up in precarious mountains on market stalls and peddled in enthusiastic tones.
Or in the arms of women who sit in the corners selling handfuls of carrots and bunches of parsley. No other country in the EU is home to as many farmers as Romania: every third EU farmer lives here, and nowhere else are the farms so small. 95 percent of Romania’s 3.5 million farmers cultivate land amounting to less than ten hectares; most of them have less than five. A German farmer would barely scrape by with ten hectares. In Vurpăr, this amount of land would make you a large-scale farmer.
According to a release of the two organizations, the Romanian Farmers Club and the National Potato Federation had a first meeting with the Minister of Agriculture, Adrian-Nechita Oros, in which the proposal for the implementation of a National Strategic Potato Plan was presented. The two organisations argued for the need for the ministry to re-analyze the partial distribution of the amounts allocated to the support coupled to the early potato measure for industrialization and the seed potato. The Club and the Federation carried out an analysis in this regard and provided the ministry with detailed economic and technical data.
“We believe that the repeated redistribution, each year, of the amounts allocated to this crop to other measures seriously harms potato growers, very few in fact, growers who have already suffered significant losses to the table potato crop, sold in 2020 below the cost price. The low price of table potatoes will also be directly reflected on the few seed potato producers left in country, who are practically without customers and are in danger of drastically reducing the area forecast for the current year,” says Romulus Oprea, president of the Potato National Federation in Romania. For more information: agroberichtenbuitenland.nl
The Romanian agricultural sector would not have been able to produce enough to replace the imported items, even though Romania has the sixth largest area used for agricultural purposes in the EU and, at an average of 2,000 euros per hectare, the cheapest land. Romania boasts the largest harvest of sunflower seeds of all EU countries and exports the most corn.
Male lambs are shipped to the Islamic world in their millions. However, aside from a few large-scale investors, the farming methods used are relatively unproductive. Each person cultivates their own plot of land and resists any kind of collaboration or forming of cooperatives – regardless of whether it would make economic sense. The memories of forced collectivization during the communist era are too painful, even for farmers who did not experience this first-hand.
