Despite the bad news of 2009, Stefan Poienaru remains
optimistic: he invested more in raw material and worked the land
more efficiently than in previous years to offset the decline in
turnover next year. “Those who did not have such a positive
approach will go through two bad years in a row and prolong the
ailment,” Poienaru says. “We must not skimp on technology – with
proper technology you get good results; if the weather helps, too,
you get outstanding results,” the businessman says.
Stefan Poienaru, however, is one of the few farmers who can afford
to make such calculations. Most of the arable land in the country
is worked by small farmers and subsistence farming accounts for
more than 90% of the farms. There are but a handful of people to
have amassed a lot of farming land: Stefan Poienaru, Culita Tarata,
Ioan Niculae, Adrian Porumboiu and Mihai Anghel own 200,000
hectares of the cultivated area of the country, that is about
2%.
As far as Poienaru is concerned, he evaluates his business at 15-16
million euros this year, compared with 26 million euros last year,
with a 7% profitability (about 1.9 million euros). The year 2009
came with a series of bad news: on the one hand, production stood
at 35% of last year’s harvest, drought affected the crops, and the
losses caused by disasters are put at some three million euros.
Grain prices have not helped farmers, either, as they went down by
about 20% compared with last year to 0.4 RON/kilogram, while the
sunflower price fell 30% to 0.7 RON/kilogram. Actually, companies
in this business said 2009 was the worst year for Romanian
agriculture.
Many are blaming the severe fragmentation of plots of land after
1990. About 60-70% of the total farming land is fragmented into
tiny bits “and there is no profitability (in it i.e.)” says Mihai
Anghel, the owner of Cerealcom Dolj. He adds that the potential of
the Romanian agriculture is to feed 80 million people. “I don’t
want as much land as I have now. I for one do not believe in the
future of big farms,” Stefan Poienaru says. The agriculture model
he sees for Romania is that of a small plot of land, worked by a
family, where owners know exactly what resources they used and reap
the benefits of their work in full.