FAMILY FARM: A MULTIDIMENSIONAL REALITY

Mar­ioara RUSU
Insti­tute of Agri­cul­tur­al Eco­nom­ics
Cor­re­spond­ing author e‑mail: rusu.marioara @ gmail.com

Abstract: Fam­i­ly farm­ing plays an impor­tant role in food secu­ri­ty and sus­tain­able rur­al devel­op­ment, in both devel­oped and devel­op­ing coun­tries. If in recent his­to­ry, West­ern Europe was based on a strong sec­tor of fam­i­ly farm­ing, for Roma­nia and oth­er for­mer com­mu­nist coun­tries, it reap­peared in the debate after the changes that occurred in the 1990s. (the col­lapse of the com­mu­nist regimes). Due to the com­plex­i­ty and het­ero­gene­ity of farms all over the world, there is cur­rent­ly no con­sen­sus on the def­i­n­i­tion of fam­i­ly farm­ing: how the fam­i­ly farm is defined varies by coun­try and con­text. The objec­tive of this paper is to iden­ti­fy fam­i­ly farms in Roma­nia based on acces­si­ble para­me­ters, easy to mea­sure. The approached top­ic required the use of an appro­pri­ate method­ol­o­gy, which includ­ed both meth­ods of doc­u­men­tary and sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis. The emerged con­clu­sion was that propos­ing a def­i­n­i­tion and select­ing spe­cif­ic para­me­ters has a sig­nif­i­cant impor­tance in char­ac­ter­iz­ing and eval­u­at­ing the impor­tance of fam­i­ly farms, an impor­tant step in propos­ing and imple­ment­ing ded­i­cat­ed poli­cies.
Key­words: farm, def­i­n­i­tions of fam­i­ly farm, defin­ing para­me­ters, Roma­nia
JEL clas­si­fi­ca­tion: Q12