Changes of the Organizational and Economic Structure of Bulgarian Agriculture

Nina Koteva

Abstract: The ongoing structural changes in agricultural holdings after the EU accession of Bulgaria provoke interest as well as the main factors determining this changes. The target of the present article is to outline the main directions of organizational and economic restructuring of Bulgarian agriculture within EU CAP. Research methods - a set of actual research methods, giving opportunity for analysis and assessment of the state, determining the factor relations and trends in farms development: system and comparative analysis; monographic method, expert assessment, method of statistical groupings, graphical method etc. The structural changes have been analyzed. The main research results are: Sustainable trend of farms number diminution. The reduction processes are most dynamic • for the small farms; • Positive trend of farms consolidation, occurring faster than for some other EU countries; • Conservation of the non-rational organizational and economic structure of agriculture – the bipolar model of farms -dominating share of small farms of individual owners and small number of large economic structures of legal entities. There is still a lack of middle layer of medium-sized farms; • Extremely low density of livestock-breeding in comparison to the EU average and the average for the monitored EU member-states; • Positive trend to increase of the level of specialization and concentration of the production, improvement of the farms market orientation; • Positive trend of decrease of the share of farms, non-eligible for SAPS payments, but their share still remains high; • Despite the increase of the average economic potential of the farms in the country, it remains lower than the average for EU; • Agricultural holdings in Bulgaria are low diversified to other activities with a decreasing trend, which leads to a restriction of the opportunities of revenues increase and to a risk of incomes destabilization.

Keywords: agricultural holdings; agriculture; farms restructuring; organizational-economic structure of agriculture

Date published: 2019-07-11