Information and local economy
Romania’s small-scale farmers need information and technical assistance to achieve an integrated use of all the Rural Development Programme measures available to them. There are over 3 million subsistence and semi-subsistence farmers in Romania. They have very low capacity to gain access to Rural Development Programme measures.
Fundatia ADEPT has been working to solve these problems by forming information groups for farmers, packing information in usable forms, and training in implementation. This strongly involves raising the capacity and increasing the role of existing farmers associations, and cooperation with the Romanian National Rural Development Network.
The project initially targeted the 5,000 farming families in the Tarnava Mare area and now the project is expanding its communication
activities to national level.
It demonstrated that farmers will actively work together in associations and cooperative actions when there is business advantage in membership. It improved the capacity of farmer associations so that they could act as channels of information, thus raising farmers’ capacity for joint actions and price negotiation.