Hungarian Agriculture and EU Accession

Prior to enlargement regulations and the subsidy system played an important role in stabilising, especially, the livestock sectors, producers got used to national intervention mechanism, and production became rather insensitive to market signals. This, along with other shortcomings, caused serious problems in the process of opening the domestic markets during the EU integration process. In this paper, after discussing the evolution of the Hungarian agricultural policy, we focus on the major agricultural sectors in the context of the development of agricultural and food trade in Hungary after EU enlargement. Despite excess stocks of cereals, the prospects for the major feed grain consuming sectors (i.e. dairy, pig meat and broiler meat production) to expand look rather slim in the mid-term. Meat and dairy producers will face the burdens of adjustment in the livestock sectors and the anticipated boom of biofuel production in Hungary.