Sustainable Development Strategy for the Agri-food Sector and Rural Area – Horizon 2030

Abstract Following the evolution of the Romanian agri-food sector and rural area after more than two decades from December 1989 and at seven years from Romania's accession to the EU, and investigating it in a large enough time period for the consolidation of Romania's agrarian structures, taking into consideration the too slow progress of the overall national agri-food system, the still large discrepancies and non-convergence between our country's agriculture and that of the other EU countries, the existence of large severe rural poverty areas, as well as the precarity of Romania's population's food security, in the present paper, the Institute of Agricultural Economics of the Romanian Academy proposes the agri-food and rural development strategy of Romania. The rural strategy establishes the guidelines for the agri-food sector and rural area sustainable development, as one of the basic components of resuming economic growth in Romania, as conditioned by: ensuring national food security and guaranteeing food safety for Romania's population; the natural, material and human resources of Romania's agriculture, and the ecological suitability of Romania's agricultural resources to supply high quality agri-food products on the domestic and foreign markets.