The Competitiveness of The Romanian Agri-Food Sector in Comparison with European Countries

Abstract

The competitiveness of the Romanian agri-food sector benefits from the significant agricultural potential of our country, characterized by a favorable climate and fertile soils, which offer the possibility of diversifying cultivated agri-food products and, implicitly, the complex satisfaction of consumer needs. Unfortunately, in Romania, most of the factors that can contribute to increasing agri-food competitiveness are not exploited to their true potential. Among the main elements on which the effort for development, modernization and growth should be focused, with an impact on Romanian agriculture, are investments for innovation, advanced technological solutions, infrastructure, synergy between the actors involved, penetration of foreign markets, etc. The objective that Romania must have in mind is to improve its positioning compared to European countries, in terms of average production per hectare. In order to determine where Romania stands in European statistics, we processed the primary data from the Eurostat databases for the years 2020-2022 and analyzed the indicators of cultivated area and average production per hectare for cereal crops, vegetables and grape vines for all European countries.