Romanian Farms and Farmers facing the EU regulations.

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romanian-farms-and-farmers-facing-eu-regulations.pdf

Abstract: The current process of globalization and the EU enlargement bring new challenges to the Romanian villages. Romanian rural area and, more specific, the agricultural sector have to face intense competition for the markets and new quality standards to be fulfilled, such as those imposed by the EU regulations.This is the pretext of the current volume. We investigate in which measure the larger Romanian individual farms and their farmers, as well as the small and medium businesses in the food producing and processing sector think that they respect contemporary standards, if they are aware of those standards, and if they plan to respect them in the near future, since they already are or will be mandatory after EU accession. Estimating the impact of imposing the EU regulations was the reason for collecting the data that we use. In its efforts to support ANCA (The National Agency for Agricultural Counseling), the World Bank raised the question of how much relatively larger individual farms and the small and medium business from food industry are aware of the respective regulations, do respect them, and how they will react in the very future as consequence of imposing the respective standards. The Research Institute for Quality of Life (RIQL) undertook this research task in the summer of 2004. A team led by Malina Voicu and Iuliana Precupetu initiated two surveys: A national survey of lager individual farms, which are present or have the potential to be present on the markets, collected quantitative information about the respective target population. A set of 20 case studies provided qualitative information about small and medium business involved in producing and processing agricultural crop.We aim to present the main findings and to discuss the state of the Romanian agriculturists in the perspective of EU integration. The discourse is descriptive and focuses on depicting several aspects:• Assessing how aware are the agricultural producers and processors about the EU regulations.• Assessing the attitude of the target population towards the EU regulations.• Assessing the need for information manifested by the target population.• Identifying the best advertising channels for promoting agricultural policies.• Estimating the profile of the expected losers and winners. After the EU regulation becoming mandatory, there is expected that some of the current companies/households involved in agricultural activities will increase their presence on the market, and will benefit from the new set up. Others will not be able to cope with the new legislative framework and will reduce their activity or even completely retreat from agricultural activities. Our analyses try to identify the main features of the so-called winners, respectively, losers, both for companies, and for households.