Abstract:

The collapse of communism in Romania claimed, as an immediate alternative, the reconsideration of the private property and, in subsidiary, the adoption of the free-market, of competitive type, relations. Achieving these major goals, which, in fact, represent the base of the capitalist economy, in agriculture, led, as a first phase, in 1991, to the communist cooperative units abolition (units which owned over 62.0% of the agricultural area of the country) and, secondly, to returning the land to former owners, deprived of it abusively in the period from 1949 to 1962. Common Agricultural Policies (CAP) considers agricultural cooperatives as agents of rural development. Such an assessment is based, above all, on the huge potential of this socio-economic structure. In this paper, we will examine the causes, but also the effects, which have governed the evolution of the Romanian agriculture’s cooperatist process and, by extension, for a better understanding of the facts, we will focus the research, from a selective perspective, on the European’s agriculture cooperatist experience.