Agriculture not attractive for young people as a business. Almost half of Romania’s farm managers are 65 or older

Sorin Melenciuc 19/07/2018 | 11:00

Romania has the biggest number of farms in the European Union, but almost half (44.3 percent) of farm managers are 65 years of age or more and only 7.6 percent are less than 40 years old, Eurostat data show.

More than a quarter (25.7 percent) of farm managers in Romania are aged between 40 and 54 years and 22.3 percent are between 55-64 years old.

One third (33 percent) of the EU’s farms were located in Romania in 2016, another third being found in Poland (14 percent), Italy (10 percent) and Spain (9 percent), according to Eurostat.

Romania is the most contrasting EU member state in terms of agricultural land, with nine in every ten farms (92 percent, or 3.1 million farms) smaller than 5 ha, while 0.5 percent of farms are 50 ha or more in size and farm half (51 percent) of all the agricultural land in the country.

In the EU, the average age of farmers is very much at the older end of the age spectrum: one third (32 percent) of farm managers were 65 years of age or more and only 11 percent were young farmers under the age of 40 years.

“Young farmers were particularly few and far between in Cyprus (3.3 percent of all farm managers), Portugal (4.2 percent) and the United Kingdom (5.3 percent). They were more common in Austria (22.2 percent), Poland (20.3 percent) and Slovakia (19.0 percent),” Eurostat said.

BR Magazine | Latest Issue

Download PDF: Business Review Magazine December (II) 2023 Issue

The December (II) 2023 issue of Business Review Magazine is now available in digital format, featuring the main cover story titled “A Visionary Leader Entrusted With Consolidating CPI's Portfolio
Sorin Melenciuc | 21/12/2023 | 14:13
Advertisement Advertisement
Close ×

We use cookies for keeping our website reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our website is used.

Accept & continue