EMPLOYMENT IN AGRICULTURE IN ROMANIA - STATE OF PLAY (SUBSISTENCE AGRICULTURE) AND ITS PERSPECTIVES (EG: GREEN FARMING)

Romanian has achieved its cherished political aim of full EU-accession but in the meantime, just barely two years after, a tremendous exogenous shock shattered the world economy, gripping in its claws a fragile small and far too open emergent market. Prices of assets have tumbled leaving both business and households with huge burden of liabilities, investors, before so eager to commit themselves to the so-called fast-growing sectors (agriculture not chief amongst them of course), have begun fretting and thus pushed the country back into the last-resort arms of the IMF and in the end everybody remembered agriculture. Romanian has indeed managed to get its way through and obtain in the new Barosso Commission the important portfolio of agriculture. While this of course vindicates our initial position almost five years ago it also points to an undeniable market reality. No matter how much in terms of profit some synthetic, sophisticated assets might bring into the short term, getting into the ever valid Keynesian statement which points to the fact that key to economic development is to maximize the length of periods of growth and prosperity, is asking from us all for a perpetual revisiting or return, to the fundamentals. In other words to those underlying assets, sometimes or in most times actually based on staples, on goods and services for which the demand is and will be perpetual and which are thus, less volatile. Agriculture serves host and source of many such underlying assets and it is precisely because of it, that prices of agricultural stapes have been floundering far less even during the current and unfortunately still unfolding world economic depression.