Why Is It Worth Subsidizing The Farmers?

• Romanian agriculture is the most fragmented in the European Union in every respect: 90% of farms cultivate less than 5 hectares. The remaining 10% of farms cultivate more than three-quarters of Romania’s total agricultural area.

• Half of the 2.8 million farms are excluded from state and EU subsidies because they cultivate less than one hectare of land.

• The fact that all subsidies depend on the size of the cultivated area demonstrably increases the number and size of medium and large farms. This also increases the amount of subsidies they receive each year.

• Romania claims that it does not support farms with huge amounts of public money only to make them more profitable. However, the figures prove the opposite. They show that fewer and fewer farmers receive more and more money, small farmers receive less and less money, young farmers are only now beginning to be really encouraged and a lot of money is flowing into green projects that require little effort.

„Hey you, there’s a bustard sitting by himself, beak
under wing in his dejection. Does he cower, or has
he croaked? Let’s see if he can fly. We’ve got to beat
the fence around him!”

Akár ez is tetszhet

Investigations Bounce Off The Eternal Mayor Of Sic

2025. October 13.

We stand by Atlatszo and condemn incitement against journalists

2023. January 19.

We are all familiar with this group provocation aimed at terrorizing Miklós Toldi; János Arany’s narrative poem was required reading in school. Many of us learnt fragments from it by heart. We are aware of the great bustard metaphor by which György Toldi referred to his younger brother Miklós. But we don’t really know what a bustard looks like. This large bird is almost extinct in Romania. Yet even at the end of the 20^th century, it was a common sight in the area around Salonta, where Arany lived and wrote Toldi 180 years ago.

Agricultural subsidies have led to the return of the great bustard to Salonta: a major farmer in Salonta noticed the potential in the bustard protection program. He turned 90 hectares of poor-quality arable land into grassland and only mowed it after the bird’s breeding season ended. Together with the basic subsidy, this brought him 2000 lei per hectare, which was worth it for him.

As a result of years of effort by the Milvus Group, the Ministry of Agriculture launched a bustard protection program in 2018. The biologists with Milvus watched more and more birds in this area. The ministry announced this subsidy in 2024 , but no longer in 2025. The farmer in Salonta who applied for it and was so proud that people could see bustards on his land, sowed the field with winter wheat.

Compared to the others, this was a small subsidy package, but it highlighted the biggest problems with agricultural subsidies in Romania:

• few farmers could apply for it (it was launched only in 19 municipalities, near the birds’ habitat in Hungary),
• it was worth applying for only by big farms,
• and the ministry stopped it without even notifying the bird protection association that had worked out the professional background.

However, Milvus put a lot of work into ensuring that its grassland conservation proposals were included in Romania’s new agricultural strategy, replied biologist Attila Nagy, working for Milvus, in response to our inquiry.

Since joining the EU in 2007, Romania has spent €45 billion in public funds on supporting farmers and rural development. This represents at least 44% of the EU funds received by the country. The agricultural subsidies from the EU are higher and higher:

Subsidies for farmers amount to around one quarter of the overall EU budget according to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The main goal of the CAP is to provide farmers with income support so that they continue to cultivate the land and produce food despite the constant fluctuations in harvests caused by weather and climate crises and despite the fact that they could earn much more elsewhere. Ten years ago, the average agricultural income in the EU was only 40% of the average income, but by 2022 it had risen to 60%. In Romania, it is especially true that the rural population is much poorer than the urban population.

The CAP also aims to ensure that we eat better quality and healthier food that we can afford. It therefore seeks to compensate for the fact that producing tasty vegetables and fruit with fewer chemicals is more expensive. From 2021, its explicit goal will be climate and environmental protection, which is why it is now allocating a lot of money to soil-friendly cultivation, biodiversity conservation, and habitat protection and restoration.

Each Member State had to draw up a detailed plan setting out what it wanted to achieve with these billions from the Common Agricultural Policy during the seven-year budget periods. Romania developed a rural development plan, abbreviated as PNDR, for the 2014–2020 budget period, and National Agricultural Strategy abbreviated as PNS, for the 2023–2027 period.

Of course, there was some delay: the PNDR started in 2015 in terms of payments and even the 2023 payments were covered by the budget of this plan. Romania completed its new agricultural strategy by the end of 2022 and its name includes the period 2023–2027. After the transitional year of 2024, most of this year’s payments will already fit into the individual programs of this strategy.

Why should we deal with agriculture

besides being fond of good eats and excursions in the countryside? Because literally more than half of Romania’s surface is agricultural land. Of the country’s 23.8 million hectares, 14 million hectares are considered agricultural land, of which 12.7 million are considered agriculturally utilized.

We should focus on agriculture because millions of people in Romania still make their living from farming, while the entire sector is undergoing radical change before our very eyes. Fifteen years ago, one third of the population was directly involved in farming; now it is a quarter.

The agricultural census of 2010 counted 7.1 million people who were involved in some kind of agricultural work. Of these, more than four million worked less than 100 days a year, meaning that farming was not their main occupation, but they did participate in agriculture. In 2020, only 4.5 million people were farming, with three million working part-time: less than 100 days a year.

The mechanization of the agricultural sector, the depopulation and aging of rural areas are further reflected in the fact that the number of people actually employed in the sector has fallen by two-thirds. While the total number of employees in Romania fell by nearly 9% between 2013 and 2022, the number of employees in agriculture fell by nearly 66%, according to this agricultural study, which summarizes the sector’s performance between 2013 and 2022. The 2.5 million people employed in agriculture shrank to 878,000 in ten years.

We often talk (and write) about education or healthcare as issues that concern society as a whole. We all went to school, many of us teach and many of us have children in schools. We have opinions about it and want to have a say in what happens in schools. Similarly, we all eat, which means we are customers of agriculture, and millions of people farm.

In the past years, the ministry of education only spent two, at best three times more on our entire educational system than the amount the flowed into one productive sector, namely to agriculture and rural development (RON 30-46 billion vs RON 15-17 billion per year). The expenditures in education reached four times the amount of agricultural subsidies in 2024.

Compared to education, we don’t talk about agriculture half as much or even a quarter as much, at least not as a matter of concern for society as a whole. Meanwhile, it is rapidly changing and transforming the landscape we call our homeland.

There are one million less consumer. But how come?

While in 2010 there were 20.1 million people living in Romania, in 2020 there were only 19 million, according to official census data. (We have written here about why these figures do not reflect reality. But these are the official data, so we have to work with them.) This means that in the 2020s, there are at least one million less people eating in this country than in the 2010s.

At the same time, domestic agriculture is increasingly unable to meet our needs: we are importing more and more food, says Sorin Ionițescu’s aforementioned study. Let’s see how the Romanian agriculture performed between 2013–2022 when it was subsidized with roughly € 25 billion from public funds.

During this period, the total GDP grew by 121%, while the GDP generated by agriculture grew by 83%. Specifically, it grew from RON 34.42 billion to RON 63.04 billion, but at the same time, the share of the agricultural sector in the GDP fell from 5.4% to 4.5%.

In 2013, agriculture generated a GDP of RON 34.42 billion, with EU and Romanian state subsidies amounting to RON 8.1 billion. According to our calculations, EU and state subsidies contributed RON 15.5 billion to the 2022 GDP of RON 63.04 billion. This means that roughly a quarter of agriculture is financed by public funds.

Meanwhile the food prices in shops are high enough, so it is well worth importing many basic foodstuffs from abroad. While in the years following our accession to the EU, domestic products still accounted for over 80% of basic foodstuffs, by 2024 their share had fallen to 56% in grocery stores, according to data of the Competition Council.

Of the store chains’ own-brand products, which are typically the cheapest, less than half (48.8%) of food products were produced domestically. Even though transporting food from abroad inevitably increases its cost, it is still worthwhile importing staple foods into a country with a large and diverse agricultural sector.

In this increasingly competitive agricultural market, one thing has not changed in ten years: agriculture can produce four times as much with the public money flowing into it. The way food is produced and the food market itself have undergone a complete transformation. Production is much more concentrated: on increasingly large and sophisticated farms (as will be explained below), with a third of the number of legally paid workers. And we are exporting more and more food, but importing even more.

In the aforementioned period, between 2013–2022 the value of Romanian agricultural exports increased by 126%. Its share in total Romanian exports also increased from just under 11% to 13%. Meanwhile, however, the value of agricultural and food imports rose by 167% and their share in total domestic imports also increased from nearly 8.9% to 10.5%.

What are agricultural and rural development subsidies spent on?

The Romanian agency that manages agricultural subsidies, APIA, paid EU subsidies to farmers in only ten different programs and packages in 2007, but now pays them in 109. The Romanian budget contributes around 5 percent to this.

The two major sources of EU subsidies are divided according to their intended use. The source of subsidies paid per hectare or based on the number of animals raised is called the Guarantee Fund (FEGA). This source accounts for about two-thirds of the subsidies paid nationally and is intended to supplement farmers’ incomes.

The other source is the Rural Development Fund, FEADR. Part of this is managed by APIA and part by AFIR. The AFIR acronym may be familiar from many rural investment information boards, as it covers a good third of payments, sometimes even more. This fund includes certain climate and environmental subsidies for farmers, but many food processing companies and rural guesthouses also apply for it.

In Romania, many rural companies receive development funds from this source even if they have nothing to do with food production. Many rural municipalities use this fund to pave roads or build sewage systems. Tourist information offices, which mushroomed in villages and then often closed down, were also set up with this fund.

The aim of the fund is to compensate to some extent for rural disadvantages: the lack of infrastructure, or its scarcity, or poor quality. As there are fewer and poorer consumers, rural companies are not as profitable and find it more difficult to obtain credit for development. The EU is trying to partially offset this with this fund.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development decides what yearly subsidies can be applied for in addition to the standard payments per hectare and per animal raised. Romania’s National Agricultural Strategy serves as a guideline in this regard: in principle, the programs announced are intended to promote the main objectives of the agricultural strategy.

The current Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) encourages Member States to give equal weight to the economic, environmental and climate sustainability of farms when spending subsidies. Forty percent of subsidies for 2023–2027 must be spent on climate and environmental protection.

Member States must specify which funding programs (and the budget for each program) they intend to use to promote the profitability, modernization, environmental and economic resilience, and the size of the budget for each program has been largely left to the Member States by the European Commission in the CAP and budget period running until 2027.

The goals of environmental sustainability are shared: soil protection, water quality and biodiversity conservation. There are also many similarities in the good agricultural practices that preserve these important environmental conditions: crop rotation, ban on plowing permanent grasslands, and minimal disturbance of arable land.

To find out why it is not good to disturb the soil and how soil-friendly farming is related to biodiversity and crop yields, it is worth listening to Dutch teacher Marc Siepman, with whom we spoke this summer:

However, it is up to the Member States to decide, for example, what level of crop rotation or soil cover farmers must achieve in order to receive environmental subsidies. They also decide how much money to allocate to these funding programs.

These programs are usually announced for four to five years, depending on what the ministry has agreed with the European Commission. Our current agricultural strategy covers the period 2023–2027, but most of its funding programs were only announced in 2025.

How can farmers find out about what is fundable?

Subsidies can be applied for during the spring months, from the first days of March until mid-May. APIA calls this the campaign period when its agents visit villages, meet with farmers at their county and local offices and inform them of any changes from the previous year, such as the discontinuation of an old subsidy line or the introduction of a new one. The most important information is also published in the daily and agricultural press.

However, meetings are also organized at various farmers’ associations or public estates, where more farmers can be reached with this information, explained Florin Bota, deputy director of APIA in Cluj County. Leaflets summarizing the various subsidies are sent to all mayor’s offices where farmers can see, at least in principle, what they should apply for. The most important information about the announced funding and deadlines will be sent in a mass message to farmers whose phone numbers are listed in the payment agency’s system.

It is common for livestock farmers to obtain the important documents for their subsidy applications from a local livestock breeding association. Agricultural registrars at municipal mayor’s offices provide a great deal of assistance to crop farmers by helping them fill in the data and documents required for subsidies, so that farmers arrive at their nearest APIA office with a half-completed application, explained Florin Bota. This also helps APIA staff, because there are a lot of farmers in Cluj County, with about 600 farmers being assessed by one agency staff during the relatively short two to two-and-a-half-month application period, said the deputy director.

It is no longer very common in Cluj County for new farmers who have not previously been in the system to apply for subsidies for several hectares, replied Deputy Director Bota with an indulgent smile when asked how a new farmer can find out what subsidies they are eligible for.

However, Florin Bota acknowledged that the size, language and complexity of the guidelines detailing the conditions for various subsidies, which previously exceeded 100 pages, may limit farmers’ access to subsidies. Many of them probably do not have the patience to read and understand 30-60 such pages. In addition, there are dozens of such guides for environmental and climate protection programs alone.

What do farmers need to be eligible for subsidies?

In addition to the subsidy application, you will of course need to provide your ID card, proof of your bank account and, if you operate your farm as a sole trader or company, proof from the trade registry that the main activity of your business is agriculture. If you only cultivate your own land, you must provide an extract from the land register to prove that it is yours. If you also cultivate other people’s land, the mayor’s office will certify, based on its own agricultural records, which and how large a plot of land you also work on. The competent veterinarian will issue a certificate stating what kind of livestock a farmer keeps.

The mayor’s offices manage the agricultural record, which is not the same as the land register. This record does not contain ownership rights and history related to land, but rather who cultivates the plots belonging to the municipalities. If someone cultivates land that is not or not only their own, the clearest solution is to conclude a lease agreement with the owner of the land they cultivate and present this to the mayor’s office when requesting a certificate for the parcel in question.

In most mayor’s offices, this register is a paper-based list and there is great resistance to digitizing it and sharing it with other offices, according to a source who has previously worked with several offices.

This is how you apply for public money

Farmers applying for support take these certificates to their nearest APIA office, where the official who registers the application in the APIA system will tell the farmer what other types of support they can receive for that area and crop or pasture, in addition to the basic support per hectare, if they meet certain conditions, explained Florin Bota, deputy director of APIA in Cluj County.

They discuss with the farmer what conditions he meets and then check off in the system what subsidies the farmer is applying for on which areas of his land for that year. The basic subsidy per hectare ranged from € 85 to € 100. An additional amount of around €25 per hectare is available if the farmer running the farm is under 40 years of age and has been farming for less than five years. This can be claimed for a maximum of five years.

Income support for small farmers has developed in a very interesting way in recent years. In the payment years of the previous budget period (2015–2023), an additional €5 per hectare was paid for the first five hectares, and nearly €50 per hectare for hectares between five and thirty. This means that if a farmer cultivated a maximum of five hectares, they received a maximum of €25 extra per year. However, if they farmed at least 30 hectares, they could receive up to €1,250 per year. Furthermore, this was not only available to small farmers, but to anyone for their first 30 hectares. The new agricultural strategy remedies this unfairness by allowing farmers to claim the extra €50 for between one and fifty hectares, and those who cultivate more than fifty hectares are not eligible.

For some of the climate and environmental subsidies, farmers must commit to meeting the conditions for one year and for others, for five years and sign these commitments in a separate document. If they violate any of the conditions during this period, they will be required to repay the subsidies received in previous years, clarified the deputy director of APIA in Cluj County.

At least once a year, each farmer visits APIA to sign the subsidy application. But many already apply online on the AGI Online platform where all farmers who have registered have access to the more important details about their land, said Florin Bota. Map data, crops grown, subsidies requested – farmers can see all of this on their own phones. They can also support their applications with photos and the system only accepts photos that the farmer has taken from a specific location and angle based on GPS data.

Approximately 40% of the more than 27,000 farmers in Cluj County already submit their subsidy applications online. If the system indicates any errors or if the officials request additional information from the farmer for one of their applications, the farmer can supplement or correct it until the autumn payment period, explained Florin Bota. The APIA officials do not aim to punish farmers, but to help them obtain as much support as possible.

They are aware that half of farmers are not eligible for any support because they cannot meet the basic requirement of farming: at least one hectare on plots of at least 30 ares. (According to the 2020 agricultural census, 1.5 million of the 2.8 million farms did not reach the one-hectare size.) Only those with 10-15 hectares can be considered real farmers, noted Florin Bota. In his opinion, a farmer with less than five hectares can only produce enough for himself and his family.

The chats I had at the market do not necessarily support this. There is a seller at the farmers’ market who cultivates a total of one hectare of land with his family, does nothing else, and brings seasonal produce from there to the market in Cluj-Napoca twice a week. Of course, his goods are not the cheapest.

Many larger farmers are dissatisfied with the one-hectare entry threshold and would like to see it raised to two or five, said Deputy Director Bota. They are dissatisfied because, in their opinion, many small farmers do not produce anything, but because of the subsidies, they do not lease their land to them either.

Several of my sources who used to work for APIA agreed that farmers with between one and five hectares receive such a small amount (often less than €1,000 per year) that it can easily be classified as welfare aid. Many use it to pay their land tax, buy fertilizer or seeds. They need it, but it is nowhere near enough to run their farms, let alone develop them.

The combined effect of public money and the market: the big fish eats the small

Statistics contradict those dissatisfied with subsidizing the small farms: the small farms are quickly disappearing in Romania. In the ten years between the two agricultural censuses, half a million small farms under one hectare disappeared from the two million. Of the nearly one and a half million farms between one and five hectares, 400,000 disappeared in just ten years. Statistically, nearly 900,000 farms that disappeared during the ten-year period were all in the size category of less than five hectares.

The number of farms between five and ten hectares decreased by 20,000, while the trend reversed for farms larger than ten hectares. The number of farms larger than 10 hectares increased from 82,000 to 118,000 in ten years.

Not only did the number of small farms decrease, but the total area they cultivated also declined. Small, practically backyard gardens have not lost as much land: a quarter of those under one hectare disappeared in ten years, but their total area decreased by only a fifth.

This shows the viability of farms under one hectare and people’s attachment to backyard farming. One and a half million such farms have survived in circumstances where, unlike their larger counterparts, they have received no subsidies and are under pressure from the larger farms to sell or lease their land.

However, the total area cultivated by small farms that can be considered self-sustaining, i.e., those between one and five hectares, has decreased dramatically from 3.2 million hectares to 2.3 million hectares. The loss of one million hectares of land by farms smaller than five hectares is reflected in the gain in land by farms between ten and one hundred hectares.

This larger size category cultivated only 1.6 million hectares in 2010, but by 2020 it had grown to 2.6 million hectares, even though the total agricultural area used in Romania decreased by half a million hectares during this decade. The total area, including arable land, pastures and hayfields, shrank from 13.3 million hectares to 12.7 million hectares.

In the size category between ten and one hundred hectares, the number of farms increased by 50%, from 69,000 to 102,000. Meanwhile, the area they cultivated increased by 6%. In other words, not only did the number of farms of this size increase, but they also became larger. Farms between 20 and 50 hectares doubled their total area in ten years.

It is no coincidence that this is where the extra part of agricultural subsidies, which is 50% of the basic amount per hectare, was directed. A message from the central management of APIA dated 2021 also praised the farmers that they pooled land to improve productivity and competitiveness and it was visible in the smaller number of applications the Agency got for more hectares.

It is likely that some farms larger than 100 hectares have also grown, but this is not reflected in the statistics. This has happened partly because farms larger than 100 hectares are grouped into a single category in the 2010 agricultural census, even though there is a significant difference between a 101-hectare farm and a 1,000-hectare farm. The 2020 survey treats farms over 100 and 500 hectares, 500 and 1,000 hectares, and over 1,000 hectares as separate categories.

On the other hand, it is not possible to show farms over 100 hectares because, although the number of farms over 100 hectares increased from 13,000 to 16,000 in ten years, the total area they cultivated decreased from 6.5 million hectares to 6.1 million hectares. Now, more really large farms are cultivating less land than ten years ago.

Of course, this did not reduce the enormous inequality that characterized the Romanian agriculture. In 2010, 3.7 million farms under 100 hectares cultivated 6.8 million hectares and 13,000 farms over 100 hectares cultivated 6.5 million hectares. In 2020, 2.8 million farms under 100 hectares cultivated 6.6 million hectares, while 16,000 farms over 100 hectares cultivated 6.1 million hectares.

How much public money should a farm receive?

No matter which decision-maker or expert I have listened to over the past year, everyone emphasized that farmers cannot be expected to work for free or even at a loss. Economic predictability and social security is important to them, and indeed, one of the main goals of the common agricultural policy in Romania is to make farms more profitable.

But how profitable? Not only does the previous or current agricultural strategy not address this issue, but the question has not even entered the public discourse in Romania. Everyone agrees that farmers deserve a middle-class lifestyle. That, despite the constraints of farming, they too should be able to go on holiday once a year.

How much public money should we allocate for this, considering the size of the farms? The European Commission plans to limit the maximum amount that a single farm can annualy claim in agricultural subsidies in the budget period starting in 2028. This summer, it announced an upper limit of €100,000, which has already sparked opposition from farmers.

Environmental and small farmer protection organizations have long been calling for this cap, since the lack of it, i.e., unlimited payments per hectare, has clearly encouraged the disappearance of small farms and the growth of larger ones.

While smaller farms, by their very size, generate greater diversity with crops grown and natural boundaries between fields, larger farms are more prone to monocultures and to plowing under wooded, bushy patches, which, as plot boundaries, also provide shelter for pollinating insects, small animals and many plant species.

I spoke in more detail with plant ecologist Thomas Kuhn about how farm size and farming methods affect biodiversity:

The biologist’s conclusions are clear: while industrial farming can feed more people at a lower immediate cost, small-scale farming preserves or even increases biodiversity, which is also beneficial to large farms. There are no longer enough people in rural areas to engage in traditional farming, but those who still farm or are planning to do so in the future must be given a financial incentive to preserve species diversity.

Romania has never debated what would be a fair amount of public money to support farms that are already financially successful. And now there are farms in the country that are more profitable than the EU average. The EU measures the performance of farms in terms of so-called standard output (SO). This expresses in euros how much value is generated per hectare, so to speak, at the farm gate, i.e. before taxation.

In Romania, due to the predominance of small farms, the average SO of farms is extremely low. In 2020, it was €4,029, compared to the EU average of €38,700. However, according to Agatha Popescu’s study, Romanian farms with an SO exceeding 100,000 have already reached the EU average, while farms with an SO between 250,000 and half a million have exceeded the EU average.

Nevertheless, we finance these large companies with the same average amount per hectare as small farms between one and ten.

Fewer and fewer farmers get more and more money

Payments have been increasing, meaning that more large farmers receive support relative to the number of large farmers than small farmers do relative to the total number of small farmers cultivating the land.

However, neither APIA nor the Ministry of Agriculture mentions this. However, this is very clear from the payments if we categorize them a little and it is also clear from APIA’s annual reports if we read them together. These show that 20-30,000 fewer subsidy applications are submitted each year, but the number of hectares receiving subsidies is increasing.

The data for payments made in 2023 and 2024 comes from this online database from this online database, while payments made between 2020 and 2022 were still available on this website this page at the beginning of 2025. This allowed us to compare payments made over a five-year period. We found that in 2020, 3.5 million payments accounted for €2.5 billion in subsidies, while in 2024, only 2.3 million payments accounted for €3.3 billion in total subsidies. In just five years, the number of payments fell by a third, while the amount paid out increased by a third.

To get a clearer picture, we separated the payments made to family farms and those made to commercial farms and processing plants. The basis for the division is not whether the farm is operated by a private individual or a business because the subsidy system also encouraged farmers applying for support to register as sole traders or family businesses (abbreviated in Romanian as PFA, II, IF).

In the list of payments, we categorized the names as family farms where a personal name appeared, but also those where the name or abbreviation PFA, sole proprietorship (întreprindere individuală), or family business (întreprindere familială) appeared. This allowed us to roughly separate farms that are run only by the farmer and family members (probably with occasional day laborers) from those whose corporate form allows them to hire employees (limited liability company, joint stock company, commercial company, etc.).

As it turned out, the National Institute of Statistics also categorized farms in this way in its agricultural censuses organized every ten years. These agricultural censuses also show that family farms cultivated nearly one million hectares less land in 2020 than they did ten years earlier. Meanwhile, companies expanded their land area by 360,000 hectares in the same ten-year period, during which the total area under cultivation decreased by half a million hectares.

Subsidies have clearly shifted towards corporate farms. These farms already cultivated 1.5 million hectares more than family farms in 2010, and by 2020, they were cultivating nearly 3 million hectares more. In contrast, even in 2020, they received less total subsidies, just over €1 billion, while family farms received €1.5 billion. In 2024, however, both groups received the same amount, €1.64 billion.

This also suggests that the statistically documented expansion of medium and large farms continued after 2020. It also reflects the fact that the 2014-2020 rural development plan (whose budget even covered some of last year’s payments) supported not only agricultural companies, but any company registered in rural areas in order to increase rural employment.

The fact that small farms have fallen even further behind in terms of subsidies this decade, with subsidies going mainly to medium and large farms, is clearly evident from the distribution of the number and amount of subsidies.

The number of small payments of less than €100 made to family farms has almost halved in five years. In 2020, APIA made 1.1 million such payments, but by 2024 this figure will have fallen to just 672,000. The number of payments between €100 and €1,000, which are still only on the level of social aids, has also fallen by more than a third, from two million to 1.3 million.

Family farms received even less than the payments of between €1,000 and €10,000 in 2024 than they did in 2020. This indicates that farms smaller than ten hectares receive virtually no realistic support, even though 2.7 million of the 2.8 million farms fall into this size category and this category cultivates one-third of Romania’s total agricultural area.

On the other hand, the number of payments over €10,000 increased by 50% by 2024, and the number of payments between €100,000 and €1 million doubled. The same trend can be observed among companies: the number of payments up to €10,000 decreased over the five years examined, while payments over €10,000 increased by at least 50%.

In fact, we are paying more than one million euros in public funds to companies: to 38 companies in 2020 and to 58 companies in 2024. In this millionaire category, at least the amount of subsidies has not increased at the same rate. While in 2020, the 38 companies received €91 million, or an average of €2.4 million per company, in 2024, the 58 companies received “only” €133 million, with an average of €2.2 million.

The shift towards higher payments is also reflected in the increase in amounts per category. The total amount of payments under €1,000 made by companies has fallen by more than half in five years. The amount of payments up to ten thousand euros has increased slightly, while their number has decreased, meaning that fewer companies are now receiving more money in this category.

The amount of payments between ten and one hundred thousand euros increased by 50%, as did their number. The amount of payments between one hundred thousand and one million euros almost doubled. While the number of supported companies increased by 76%, the amount of support increased by 85%.

The amount of payments to family farms exceeding €100,000 tripled, while the number of such payments only doubled. The final amount of €38 million in 2020 exceeded €100 million several times in the following years.

We pay several times that amount to companies: whether they are farms operating as larger enterprises or processing plants. In 2020, companies received €337 million in subsidies in payments exceeding €100,000, and in 2024, this figure will rise to €627 million. The average amount per payment per company has increased to over €100,000 in the last five years.

It’s worth paying attention to these payments above € 10,000 and 100,000 keeping in mind that at present the average price of one hectare agricultural land amounts to € 8,000 – 9,000.

Why is it important to know what we’re paying for?

The APIA’s annual reports do not specify how much support each farm receives by size category. If we do not know how much public money we are using to support large farms that are already competitive and profitable, how much we are spending on developing medium-sized farms, and how much money we are allocating to maintaining the diversity, diversity, and resilience provided by small farms, then we cannot even begin to think about what is more beneficial to society and which goal we should spend more public money on.

We need to figure out what is most important to us here in Romania because the European Commission has already outlined how it envisions spending the large development funds in the new budget period beginning in 2028. The core of this idea, which has been vehemently attacked in Romania since its publication in the summer, is that the EC would merge the Cohesion Fund with agricultural subsidies and leave it up to the member states and regions to decide for themselves whether they want to use this money to develop industry, infrastructure or agriculture in each region.

Farmers felt that this would jeopardize their guaranteed, hectare-based subsidies and Germany, along with the Eastern European member states, opposed the idea. All Romanian politicians who have spoken out on the issue so far have criticized the consolidation of development funds. The President of the EC, Ursula von der Leyen refined her message in November and said the Common Agricultural Policy will continue to play an income-supplementing role worth almost € 300 billion from 2028 onwards, and will not be merged with the Cohesion Fund.

The EC also intends to give a role in decisions on rural development funds to those EU regions that have neither administrative nor political power in our country. In Romania, these regions have no decision-making powers; we are still trying to govern the country using the county system from 1968. In other words, the EC’s vision benefits countries that know themselves, know what they have, and know what they want to do at the regional level. They have a clear picture of their present and their future.

Romania does not have a clear, realistic, official and public understanding of itself in the field of agriculture. From the data collected in the agricultural censuses repeated every ten years, we can conclude how subsidies (along with market and demographic processes, of course) have influenced the agricultural sector.

However, this makes it difficult to understand and influence how public money should be spent from 2028 onwards in an agricultural sector as divided as Romania’s. For the time being, Transylvanian politicians are waiting to see what will be decided in Brussels in the discussions between the European Commission and the European Parliament on the next budget period. Meaningful consultations with agricultural organizations on their priorities after 2027 have not yet begun in Romania, according to Csaba Könczei, vice-chair of the Chamber of Deputies’ Agricultural Committee.

The Ministry of Agriculture said it is in constant consultation with farmers’ representative organizations, but reported only one meeting. Ten representatives of two major farmers’ associations visited in the Ministry on 7 October where they talked about how the agricultural subsidies should stay separated from the cohesion funds, the subsidy from the Romanian state should increase to 30% and the government should reject the EU’s proposal to set an upper limit on direct payments, as this would harm the competitiveness of medium-sized and large farms.

There are still two years left to ensure that other considerations are taken into account alongside the interests of large farmers. This is because the direct payment system

has so far given medium-sized and large farmers an advantage.

Ten years ago, APIA recorded 1,1 million subsidized farmers, stated the press of the time.

The APIA representatives I spoke to also interpret the figure published by APIA as the number of individual grant applications. It also publishes the number of hectares receiving support. This is how it looked over the past five years:

In other words, while the number of subsidy applications fell by 400,000 over ten years and by almost 100,000 over the last five years, the number of subsidized hectares increased by 150,000. The number of applications is decreasing by 20,000 to 30,000 per year, which is equivalent to the farmers of an entire county giving up subsidies each year, while the number of subsidized hectares is increasing. EU subsidies are going to fewer but larger farms.

Two other data sets show that the number of applications may not correspond to the number of individual farms receiving support. The 2020 agricultural census counted not 826,000 but only 648,000 farms that received EU subsidies in that year and the previous two years.

On the list of payments for 2020, we found only 808,546 unique identification codes, with payments going not only to farmers but also to rural companies and local governments for infrastructure development. This means that there must be more unique identifiers in the system than there are farms. But according to our data, there would have been an absurd situation where more farms received subsidies than there are farms and all other subsidized companies and municipalities combined.

In any case, my sources at APIA unanimously stated that the agricultural census data was incorrect, and that at that time, subsidies were definitely paid to more than 800,000 farmers. If this was indeed the case, it increases skepticism about public and official data, as well as about how well the Romanian state knows itself and how it can plan strategies based on contradictory data.

The system anomaly described above did not occur in the following two years, during which APIA still published the unique identification codes. From 2023, it will no longer publish these, even though it has completely reliable data on exactly

how many and what size farms it pays subsidies to and for exactly how much land.

I saw this with my own eyes. One of my sources at APIA, who asked to remain anonymous, showed me what they see on their internal system: almost every bush, updated weekly. They receive fresh satellite images of the entire country every week, and with a couple of clicks, they can project onto any area to see which farmer received what kind of support in which part. All this goes back years. With two more clicks, they can bring up the land registry data, the old paper-based land registry names, and the new digital land registry land designations.

Two farmers cannot receive subsidies for the same area because the system immediately flags the overlap. Officials notify both farmers to clarify the overlapping areas, otherwise the subsidy applications cannot be finalized. The system also uses satellite images to verify that the farmer is actually growing the crops for which he applied for subsidies, that he is complying with various environmental conditions, and that he has not cleared his land by burning. If the system detects signs of burning, the farmer is notified and must obtain a certificate from the fire department confirming that he did not set fire to the vegetation on his land.

According to its own annual reports, APIA has at least 2.3 million farms listed in its database. The list of individual payments can be searched by name and settlement how much money someone got, but they have never published the area or the number of farm animals the individual got paid for. This is not disclosed even upon request, citing the GDPR.

The Ministry of Agriculture boasts every year that it managed to spend 95% or even 98% of the EU subsidies for agriculture.

But what does APIA disclose then?

Basically, accounting data on the total amount paid out to all farmers who applied for a particular subsidy program. In addition, it sometimes provides the average amount per hectare, most recently for 2022.

Let’s see how this works. APIA reported that in 2022, it paid out €897,639,433 in basic subsidies per hectare. In theory, everyone who is included in the subsidy system receives the same amount, and all other types of support (if someone is young, an organic farmer, or a smallholder) are added to this basic support as extras. Of course, the amount paid for arable land and grassland is different, but let’s temporarily ignore that.

It also stated that the average amount per hectare was €96.28. If we divide the total amount by the average, we get that in 2022, APIA provided some form of subsidy for 9.3 million hectares, statistically speaking. However, APIA also stated in its report and press releases that it provided support for 9.9 million hectares in 2022.

This does not tell us how many individual hectares were subsidized, how many hectares received only basic support, how many received the more generous environmental subsidies, or how many hectares are cultivated by farmers who receive extra subsidies because they are under 40 or because they cultivate less than 50 hectares.

In other words, the official data does not tell us how public funds earmarked for specific purposes (farm succession, helping small farmers, operating cooperatives) are being used. Is it worth spending money on generational change and climate protection, or is everyone just chasing subsidies?

One third of the funds are spent on climate and environmental protection

If we look only at the total amounts spent, Romania is doing very well. One third of all subsidies go to basic support per hectare (€800 – 900 million) and income support for farming on smaller areas (€100 – 180 million) per year. Another third of subsidies (€960 million – €1.1 billion) goes to programs related to climate and environmental protection and greening.

The third billion covers everything else: rewards for achieving and selling certain crop yields (around €250 million per year), livestock farming and animal welfare investments, attracting young farmers, extra support for less common crops or breeding animals to make them more marketable, etc.

The amount of climate and environmental payments is so exceptionally high that we took a closer look at what it covers. Applications can only be submitted for areas that are already included in the basic support and these green subsidies are also based on the number of hectares. In addition, multiple types of green subsidies can be applied for the same area if it meets the various conditions.

Half of the billion-euro amount was paid out for climate- and environment-friendly farming in the years examined. This basically means that permanent grasslands cannot be plowed, crop rotation must be practiced on arable land and extra money is paid if there are ecologically important landscape elements on or next to the arable land: nitrogen-fixing crops, field margins, tree rows, individual trees, bushes, hedges and buffer zones along rivers or standing waters. The Transylvanian landscape abounds in such features.

A quarter of the amount, €250 – 270 million, is paid for areas that are restricted in some way by nature itself, such as the usability of mountain grasslands due to altitude. Anyone who maintains at least one hectare of pasture and/or hayfield above 1,000 meters can claim compensation for harsh mountain conditions.

In addition, extra subsidies can be requested for areas where certain protected animal species live, if the farmer undertakes not to disturb the area during the species’ critical life stages and not to use any chemicals at all. This costs between €130 and €200 million per year. The state pays the highest compensation for pastures and hayfields where certain species of Maculinea butterflies live. In the part of the Mezőség between Kecsed (Alunis) and Magyarszovát (Suatu), if these pastures and hayfields are maintained by hand only, the state pays €410 per hectare, while if light machinery is used, it pays €331.

The second most profitable is the protection of the corncrake (Crex crex): the state pays €310 per hectare if the grassland in question is maintained only by hand and €231 if light machinery is used. The state rewards manual maintenance of the grassland feeding areas of the lesser spotted eagle (Aquila pomarina) with €269 per hectare and mechanical maintenance with €190. If this eagle hunts on arable land, the farmer can claim €151.

Organic farming and showcase greening

It is clear that 85-90% of these green payments do not require any particular effort, whereas organic farming receives little funding, between €55 and €100 million per year. However, the reward for converting to organic farming is high, at €300-600 per hectare, and depending on the crop, farmers receive €280-450 per hectare if they maintain their land as certified organic. The transition, obtaining certification, and chemical-free production all require time and effort. The state finances the transition for two to three years and maintenance for five years.

The state’s ecological commitment is also undermined by the fact that, on the one hand, it offers funding for environmentally friendly farming methods (but does not disclose how many people have applied for subsidies for no-till farming and for how much land), and on the other hand, it still subsidizes the price of diesel fuel burned during heavy machinery cultivation from the state budget. By this scheme, the Romanian government reimburses part of the excise tax on hundreds of millions of liters of diesel fuel.

In December 2025, the government increased the fuel subsidy to 163 million euros for that year. This means it allocated 60 percent more to subsidize fossil fuels in agriculture than it did to organic farming in its best year, 2024.

The wasteland scandal also showed that greening funds could be obtained without any effort and that the Ministry of Agriculture had grossly underestimated the number of applicants seeking money without making any effort. In the spring, it promised €58 per hectare to farmers who left 2% of their land fallow or if they incorporate new landscape elements into their arable land. These two elements could be combined in any way.

In early November, the ministry announced that so many people had applied for this subsidy that APIA would only pay €20 per hectare. No one knows what preliminary estimates were used to justify the €58 promised in the spring, but it is certain that the ministry set easy, not-so-green conditions. For example, stones could be included as new landscape features alongside trees, tree rows, and bushes.

What is more, no ecological conditions were imposed on the two percent of land left fallow, so that the uncultivated land would not be concentrated in huge plots. This means that if there is a wetland at the edge of a hundred-hectare arable field and the farmer does not cultivate the two hectares surrounding it, he will still receive the extra €2,000 for the hundred hectares without having to do anything. There is no requirement for the uncultivated area to form islands or ecological corridors within the huge cultivated plots for pollinators, small animals, and other plants. This means that farming the land does not become more difficult, it just brings in more money.

When announcing the correction, state secretary Emil Dumitru declared that the farmers applied for this subsidy with 5.7 million hectares of ploughland. According to the 2020 agricultural census, arable land in Romania covered 8.5 million hectares. This means that the vast majority of farmers, who already receive subsidies, met the “greening” conditions and applied for the extra money.

The bigger the area, the smaller the subsidy should be

Romania has just begun to introduce more serious restrictions on the environmental component of agricultural subsidies. The aim is to prevent people who own large areas of land from exploiting their agricultural land for ecological purposes, simply to pocket the high state subsidies. Previously, this was rarely the case.

In the rural development plan for 2014-2020 (but also in some of the 2024 payments), only compensation payments for mountain pastures and hayfields were limited by a so-called degressive reduction. In other words, only those who applied for this support for less than 50 hectares received the full amount of €97 per hectare. The amount gradually decreased to €25 per hectare at the 50, 100, and 300 hectare thresholds, but it was still possible to apply for support for areas larger than 300 hectares.

The current agricultural strategy for 2023-2027 appears to tighten this principle and extend it to all pastures and hayfields that are of high natural value or where the farmer undertakes to restrict mowing and grazing in order to protect the species mentioned. First, if the farmer cannot prove that they keep at least the minimum number of animals, they cannot claim these compensation payments. In other words, they must prove that they actually use the areas for farming for which they are requesting support. This is a realistic tightening of the previous conditions.

On the other hand, if we look at the specific amounts, they have increased. Although this type of support is being reduced in several stages, it starts at a higher amount per hectare and stops decreasing at 100 hectares. A farmer with 101 hectares of pasture receives half of the €142, just as a farmer with 302 hectares of pasture does. This means that those who have previously applied for large areas can now claim three times as much money: €71 per hectare instead of €25.

Nature conservation payments above this amount are reduced to 90% of the amount for areas of 10 hectares or more, and to 80% for areas of 50 hectares or more. Above 150 hectares, or 200 hectares for certain species, this type of compensation cannot be claimed at all. The clear message here is that at this size, the costs of maintaining such pastures and hayfields must be covered, whether it is hares that graze on them or eagles that come there for lunch.

The farmers’ trust is the hardest to cultivate

Although all surveys show that farmers who have joined cooperatives are more successful on the market, one of the least utilized parts of the Romanian subsidy system is the money earmarked for the establishment of producer cooperatives. Due to forced collectivization, it is understandable that older farmers are resistant when they hear about cooperatives, but younger farmers also find it very difficult to come together. More than half of the approximately 4,000 agricultural cooperatives have been established since 2020.

However, there are more and more local examples and even in Cluj County, that show that the key to competitiveness and profitability in such a fragmented agricultural sector is not necessarily size, but rather consolidation into producer cooperatives. In the Lunca Somesului Mic Cooperative 11 farmers farm on 15 hectares and now they transport seasonal vegetables to the regional warehouses of two national retail chains with their own trucks. And it has its place by the Someș-Arieș Cooperative farming on thousands of hectares, breeding thousands of animals that produces millions as profit from time to time.

Farmers did not exhaust the budgetary frameworks allocated for cooperation in previous periods, and payments only increased from €2 million to €6 million from 2021 onwards. The data from two years ago show that the cooperatives at that time were mainly established to make more effective use of EU subsidies. More than half of them existed only on paper and did not submit balance sheets reporting on their economic activities. Even so, the share of cooperatives in total agricultural production increased from 2% in 2020 to 4% in 2022.

The amount paid for the operation of cooperatives in 2024 has already risen to twenty million euros, but the demonstrable results are yet to be seen.

The history of the twentieth century, with its land redistributions, imperial and regime changes, and then restitution, completely fragmented agriculture in Romania and Transylvania. Nowadays, the state hardly restricts the consolidation of plots of land; in fact, to a certain extent, it actively encourages it.

However, social trust has also fallen apart along with the plots of land, and the state is investing very little in rebuilding it. Encouraging cooperatives is one small and slow way of doing this. Transparency can structurally build the state’s credibility and trust in it. This can be achieved by openly stating, or at least openly discussing, what we are spending public money on in agriculture now and what we will spend it on in the future and how we can achieve a real balance between economic and environmental-climatic sustainability.

Anna Anghel was extremely helpful in downloading, cleaning, filtering and displaying the data in this article.

The opening image shows one of the renovated gates of Alunișu, Cluj County. Photo: Tünde Szabó

This article was produced as part of the 2025 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.