Agricultural Cooperatives in the Romanian Agri-food System

In the recent years, agricultural markets and supply chains have been quite strongly affected, in an unprecedented geopolitical and economic context, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, climate change and the challenges of implementing the European Green Deal. Under these conditions, food has once again emerged as a central element of life, alongside health, and healthy eating for all depends more on social and economic conditions than on the technical aspects of food production and processing. Thus, the need to rethink and revalue local productions, supply chains and the links established at territorial level, in order to increase the resilience of agrifood systems and ensure their sustainable development, emerged. The cooperative model is considered to be suitable to address the challenges generated by transitions to sustainability, and agricultural cooperatives can significantly contribute to increasing the resilience of agri-food systems. Many agricultural cooperatives, from different countries of the world, have managed to adapt to the new situation, proving that they are important entities in the agri-food system. In this paper, we tried to identify some particularities regarding the changes in the cooperative system in Romania, in recent years, as a reaction to the challenges that the agri-food system has to face. For this purpose, we analysed the evolution of agricultural cooperatives before and after the COVID-19 pandemic and estimated the market share in different areas of activity with significant turnover, the evolution of some economic indicators, as well as their dynamics by counties and regions in an attempt to identify their development trends.