Excerpt
Between 1947 and 1989 Romania was governed by a left-wing dictatorship, as was much of Central and Eastern Europe. In 1989, Romania and her neighbors threw off this system of government, a process that proved to be more difficult than expected from ideological and economic points of view.
In Romania, agriculture and forestry make up 12.5 percent of its Gross National Product (Romanian Statistical Yearbook, 2001). Much of agriculture was state-owned under the former communist economy and decisions were centralized. Following Romania's departure from the communist system, there was a trend towards a private, capitalistic economy. This reversal is still in progress and includes inherent difficulties not previously faced, including new management styles, a need for updated equipment, adjustments to free market principles, and the opening of borders to international trade.
Agricultural lands comprise 62 percent of the country's area, two thirds of which are cropland and one third of which is pasture. Forested land includes 27 percent of the country, mainly in the mountains. Of the other land uses, 580,000 hectares, or 1.4 million acres, of the Danube Delta make up one of the few wetlands remaining in Europe. This …
Footnotes
Andrei Canarache is an emerited research scientist at the Research Institute for Soil Science and Agrochemistry in Bucharest, Romania.
- Copyright 2004 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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