Romania faces an agricultural paradox that is hard to ignore: after a year 2025 in which productions of the main crops reached record levels, farmers enter 2026 with a growing wave of insolvencies and financial difficulties. Although bountiful harvests should have bolstered the sector, the reality on the ground shows just the opposite — eroding profits, accumulated debt and increasing pressure on production costs, in a context where selling prices have fallen rapidly.
Romania is facing an agricultural paradox that is hard to ignore. Photo by Shutterstock
In 2025, Romanian agriculture benefited from favorable climatic conditions in many regions and yields above the average of recent years for wheat, corn and sunflower. Farmers reported record yields in some areas, fueling hopes of a recovery after difficult years marked by drought and grain market volatility. However, this abundance did not translate into an improvement in the financial situation, on the contrary.
The central problem arose on the market side: high supply in Europe and globally pushed prices down, while production costs remained high. Fertilizers, fuel, agricultural inputs and loan rates continued to weigh heavily on farmers' budgets, cutting profit margins sharply. In many cases, the income obtained from the sale of the crop did not cover the expenses accumulated during the agricultural year.
This combination of high production and low prices has generated a situation of structural imbalance, where even performing farms end up in trouble. Thus, the beginning of 2026 comes with a visible increase in the number of insolvencies in agriculture, a sign that success in the field does not guarantee economic stability.
Two agricultural companies went straight into bankruptcy
Official statistics show that in the course of 2025, 458 requests to open collective insolvency proceedings against small, medium and large companies were admitted, targeting companies accumulating total fixed assets of over 9.6 billion lei.
The agricultural sector contributed 44 files in the category of small, medium and large companies entered into a collective procedure, i.e. 9.6% of the total of 458 applications admitted, with cumulative fixed assets of 575.9 million lei. Most opted for the rescue tools: 33 files followed the general insolvency procedure, two entered directly into simplified bankruptcy, and nine companies accessed the preventive arrangement, the latter accumulating 289.8 million lei of the total agricultural assets entered into the procedure, i.e. more than half of the critical mass of the sector. In other words, the agricultural companies with the most to lose significantly chose to negotiate rather than liquidate.
Record production in 2025 and insolvencies in 2026
Agricultural companies that recorded revenues significantly below expectations in the summer and autumn 2025 agricultural season and exhausted working capital reserves between October and December 2025. In the absence of the expired moratorium, the insolvency materialized in formal proceedings starting in January 2026, with a lag of three to six months from when the financial difficulty had become an accounting reality. The 31 agro companies entered into the procedure in the first quarter of 2026 generated a cumulative turnover of approximately 1.68 billion lei, with a total of 953 employees at the date of the opening of the procedure, which illustrates the real economic scope of the phenomenon beyond the number of files.
“In 2025, Romania recorded the best year for wheat since 1997. Simultaneously, the share of agriculture in total insolvency proceedings rose from 9.6% (Q1 2025) to 20.7% (Q1 2026). The analysis demonstrates that the problems are structural, not conjunctural; a good harvest cannot reverse three years of accumulated losses and debt deferred through moratoriums, which simultaneously became due in August 2025. What we see today in the agricultural landscape is the result of five shocks applied to an industry already shaken by vulnerabilities“, adds Mircea Șomlea, Infinexa senior partner.
Between January 1 and March 31, 2026, 31 requests to open collective insolvency proceedings against small, medium and large companies in the agricultural sector were admitted, out of a total of 150 procedures admitted at the level of the entire economy. Compared to the same quarter of 2025, the number of files in the agricultural sector increased by 181.8%. The figures from the first quarter of 2026 reveal that agriculture does not follow the general trend of the economy, but exceeds it six times.
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X-ray shows that even in the agricultural sector, early intervention in restructuring produces incomparably better results than delay. Companies that initiate negotiations six months before insolvency have real recovery options.
The extent of financial turbulence
The turnover of the top 500 manufacturers decreased by 28.6% (from 43.2 to 30.9 billion RON), and the net profit collapsed by 70% between 2022 and 2024. Two thirds of the analyzed companies (333 out of 503) had negative working capital at the end of 2024, and 139 simultaneously presented four maximum risk criteria, with a cumulative turnover of seven billion RON.
Companies with strong balance sheets survived the same external conditions. Those with pro-cyclical over-indebtedness, no price hedging, no crop diversification and unsustainable short-term financing went into insolvency.
The five shocks that electrocuted the industry
The trap of record prices. Bread wheat reached the record level of 435 euros/ton on the MATIF exchange in Paris in May 2022. Maize escalated to 340 euros/ton, sunflowers to 800-900 dollars/ton in Constanța. Banks financed agricultural campaigns on the assumption that these levels would be maintained long enough. The trap was not in making wrong decisions under normal conditions, but in irreversibly committing correct decisions to a context that has suddenly and completely changed. Costs were incurred at the peak of the cycle and revenues were realized on the downward trajectory 6 to 12 months later. By the harvest of the summer of 2023, the price of wheat had fallen below 230 euros/ton. At the end of 2025, it was approaching historical lows.
41 months of drought. The drought began in March 2022 and continued until July 2025, i.e. 41 consecutive months, surpassing the catastrophic drought of 1945–1947. The area affected by aridity increased from 10.9% in the decade 1971–1980 to 41.5% in the period 2021–2024. Maize production decreased by 59.7% compared to 2021, sunflower by 47%. In 2024, two million hectares were officially calamity. Practically, the average yield per hectare has halved. Farmers without irrigation on more than 95% of the arable area could not operate profitably in any of the three years.
What makes consecutive droughts qualitatively different from a single drought is the progressive depletion mechanism: in 2022, companies have absorbed losses from reserves; in 2023, they operated without a buffer; in 2024, the third shock hit companies with no absorptive capacity.
Cereals from Ukraine. The Solidarity Corridors helped Ukraine, but the secondary effect on the Romanian domestic market was severe. Romania imported approximately 2.4 million tons of agri-food products from Ukraine in 2022, compared to 116,000 tons in 2021 – an increase of more than 20 times. At the level of directly competing crops, imports were approximately 200 times higher. The Romanian farmer who offered his wheat at the trader's silo knew that he had access to a cheaper alternative, exempt from customs duties. This virtually eliminated their bargaining power and pushed the purchase price to levels that no longer covered the production costs contracted the previous winter.
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The scissor effect. Nitrogen fertilizers increased from 900 lei/ton in 2020 to over 4,000 lei/ton in 2022 – a 344% increase in two years. A hectare of corn that cost 2,500–3,000 lei in 2020 had reached 5,000–6,500 lei in 2022. The balance sheet data confirms: the median expenditure/income ratio increased from 86.3% in 2022 to 97.4% in 2024, and the proportion of companies with a cost ratio above 95% increased from 23% to 63%. Total sector spending fell by just 20.3% against a 28.9% drop in revenue. Expenses are more rigid to decline than revenues, and this is the heart of the mechanism of margin destruction.
The war in Iran and fertilizer dependence. After the final shutdown of Azomureș in November 2025, Romania remained the only country in the European Union without domestic fertilizer production. On February 28, 2026, airstrikes on Iran and Iranian retaliation by controlling the Strait of Hormuz blocked a thoroughfare through which 30–46% of the global nitrogen fertilizer trade transits. The price of urea rose by 49% in a few weeks, European natural gas by 62%. Any disruption of the global chains is transmitted fully and without any dampener in the costs of the Romanian farmers. Romania approaches this shock from the most vulnerable structural position in the European Union.
