AgriMin Oros: Agriculture priorities - family farm, water management

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Adrian Oros presented, on Sunday, in a press conference, the government program in the field, mentioning among the priorities the family farm and the water management strategy.

"The first priority is the family farm. The accelerated transformation of these small, subsistence farms, almost 800,000 farms, into commercial farms, farms where a family can live decently. This means that we will support the integration of production, we will make redistributive payment of the subsidy per hectare for these farms higher, and we will have credit and guarantee instruments for these farms, and in our opinion, without a family farm, it will be difficult for rural life to exist as we have known and we know it," Oros said.

Another priority is the consolidation of the small producer and the commercialization of the production.

"The only realistic way is to solve the economic association, namely cooperatives. In the next national strategic program we will finance the activity of cooperatives. (...) Another priority is to strengthen the associative environment and for this we took the first step this year, for the first time, associates and representatives of the associations in Romania can also participate in Brussels in the meetings of the European associative environment. (...) Then we have to correct the trade balance deficit, so we get on the green and try to export processed raw material and not only export subsidized raw materials. What we will do here: we will invest in the collection, storage, stocking and processing of agri-food products. We have allocated 430 million euros," the minister explained.

He added that another issue is the development of local markets.

"We also want to encourage the association between farmers, associative members and the administrative-territorial units. And in all the counties where we have been we gave the example of Cluj, the concept 'Product of Cluj'. The county councils and town halls have the obligation and can participate in promoting local producers," said Adrian Oros.

The Minister also highlighted the importance of ensuring the exchange of generations in agriculture, of vocational and technical education in the field, of ecological agriculture.

"Another very important priority that has stood out a lot this year is this water management strategy. We need to change this paradigm very quickly in which if it rains and we have a very good rainfall regime, we have production, if it doesn't rain, we have no production. (...) This infrastructure that will serve the water management strategy will be financed from the National Resilience and Economic Recovery Program, with 6.5 billion euros," Oros showed.