Vasile Burja

Land grabbing has become a priority topic in academic research and a political concern, due to interests in the dynamics of the phenomenon and its negative impact on the sustainable development of agriculture in rural areas. This phenomenon generates changes in production systems of agriculture with adverse environmental consequences, adversely affects socio-economic and cultural conditions and leads to lower overall efficiency in agriculture. This article analyses the links between land concentration, land grabbing and sustainable development of agriculture in Romania compared to other old and new EU-28 countries. The results of the research show that the land grabbing in Romania has a significant dimension compared to the other countries analyzed, which has led to an inadequate agrarian structure and adverse effects on the sustainable performance of agricultural holdings and the sustainable development of rural areas.

Romania has favourable conditions to develop the agriculture thanks to its significant agricultural land, climate conditions and labour force employed in this sector. In the last decades, the economic transition has determined major structural transformations within the agriculture sector, which generated certain disparities between the performance of Romania's agriculture and that of the EU's developed countries. This paper deals with the relationship between the size of agricultural holdings and the performance of the agricultural production factors in Romania. In order to achieve the paper's goal, we used the Data Envelopment Analysis and the comparative analysis, taking into account the features of the other EU countries. The research findings revealed that the efficiency of production factors used in agriculture is low and, therefore, a new organization of holdings is required. This can lead to an optimal sizing of the holdings, so that the differences in performance compared to the EU's developed countries to be minimized or even eliminated.