Carmen Dumitrescu

The investment support capacity for technology of small farms and rural households in Western Romania

This paper targets the developments concluded within specifically delimited areas of LEADER axis, namely selected territories of Local Action Groups. The reason of this choice is related to the potentially large physical and economic size of the farms and households where the funding availability for co-financing and supporting the non-eligible expenditure is different to the small and medium farms and agricultural households. The aim of the analysis is to find and quantify the capacity of the small farming operations which are usually retrieved in LAGs where their relative small projects have a better chance to contract the public support compared to the national competition of the Programme (NRDP). The present analysis selects LAG territories from different geographical regions of Romania with different cultural, entrepreneurial and agricultural background and quantifies and compares the private contribution at the scale of the territories in order to check the assumption that the supporting capacity of small farms and agricultural households is very limited. As the conclusions highlight the capacity is far from being reduced or small particularly when the scale of operations is relatively small. Also, the financial surroundings and the overall success of the implementation are the best public-private-partnership success story in Romania for the last century-quarter.