Although its share in Romania's Gross Domestic Product is relatively small (about 5%), agriculture is one of the important activities of the national economy, with direct implications on ensuring food security. Achieving an efficient modern agriculture represents a major strategic objective for Romania, imposed both by the need of ensuring food security and the role of this activity in supporting export. In this chapter it is analysed the evolution of Romanian agriculture in the context of sustainable development's objectives, through the resources available in this activity: land, technical means, human resources and financial resources. In doing so, we considered an analysis of the agricultural real estate, labour force, investments and loans used in agriculture on the period 2008 – 2014.
TopBackground
Agriculture has played a major role in the development of society at all times. In recent decades, however, the demand for food has continuously increased due to the rapid growth of the world population. Moreover, food security has become a national priority for all countries, no matter of their economic development, which requires the use of measures to support agriculture and farmers (Barbu, 2011).
Meeting the growing demand for food was achieved mainly by increasing agricultural production (Lambin et al., 2000). Basically, it is considered (Dietrich et al., 2012) that there are two possibilities of increasing the agricultural production:
Given that expansion of agricultural areas is limited, increasing the agricultural production based on productivity growth is the only option in most states (Oniciou, 2014)
In the last 20-30 years it was less talked about intensive agriculture, the emphasis being on sustainable agriculture. The new paradigm of sustainable growth highlights the role of agriculture in economic growth, in ensuring food security, in poverty reduction, rural development and environmental protection (Byerlee et al., 2009).
The idea of sustainable agriculture implies the use of modern work methods and technologies that provide high productivity and consistent profits with minimum negative effects on the environment and that ensure the elementary safety of the population. Also, agriculture will have to play an important role in the economic development of rural areas and in improving the living standard of the population (Bălăceanu at al., 2014).