Romanian agrarian structure after thirty years

Abstract

Land ownership was and still is one of the most important indicators of wealth, even if the importance of agricultural sector has diminished in the last half of the century, at least in the developed countries. The current status of the Romanian agricultural sector is not only the sum of the agrarian reforms adopted in the nineties, but the result of the agrarian reforms of the past century and a half, with their instances of progress and regression, but, especially, their times of deep rupture.

The article is a comparative analysis of the information available from the agricultural censuses of 1948, 2002, and 2010 and the structural investigation of the agricultural sector of 2016, capturing the developments which have taken place in the last 30 years, thus enabling us to draw conclusions as to these developments and the consequences of the post-1990 agrarian reforms.

The conclusion is that agricultural holdings are extremely polarized and very fragmented, mostly dwarf in size, economically inefficient, lacking a modern set of agricultural machineries that determines low quantitative and qualitative productions as a result. This has caused the Romanian rural population to live on the brink of poverty and the agricultural sector to continue to be underdeveloped.