Mihai Anghel, Cerealcom Dolj: What we are doing now is called survival

He runs a 100m-euro agricultural business, has 600 employees and is among Romania’s three largest farmers. Mihai Anghel says he did an extraordinary thing considering most farmers are working a hectare of agricultural land, but that he did not do much taking into account a normal agriculture, like in the rest of Europe.

Most of the times, he talks to people on the phone, from the fields. He rarely comes to Bucharest to meet his partners or negotiate a financing line with a bank. And when he comes his time is limited. He does not want to talk much about himself, but rather about the situation of agriculture, saying he feels “disappointed”.

“We must talk about Romania’s agriculture as about something of the past. Many have said it and I’m saying it too, we have a potential to feed 80 million people, but that we are importing at least 50% of what we eat. We’ve so far destroyed everything, the land is fragmented like nowhere else, we’re working like in the Middle Ages, with horses, and we’re largely depending on what we get from others. One can only talk about an economy when one relies on a product destined for sale. When one makes a product to maintain existence, this is called survival,” Anghel says.

“Romania has never been so low,” he says. “We have been going down for the past 20 years, despite some years of growth, 2007 and 2008. The rural world has been destroyed (…),” says Anghel, blaming the lack of strategy and the fact that everything has been done chaotically. “We haven’t had any strategy. In agriculture, one must start with associative forms (…),” believes Anghel.

Should agriculture start to function, we would not get any results earlier than 20 years from now, believes the owner of Cerealcom Dolj.

Agricultural potential has been ignored, though. Romania has nine million hectares of agricultural land, and working it would mean the development of agricultural production and subsequently of related fields.