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Romania Major Crops
Corn and wheat (predominantly of the winter varieties)
occupied
nearly two-thirds of all arable land in the 1980s and
about 90
percent of all grain lands. Corn, the staple of the
peasant diet,
was grown on 3.1 million hectares in 1987, while wheat was
sown on
2.4 million hectares. Other important grains included
barley
(560,000 hectares), oats (70,000 hectares), rice (47,000
hectares),
and rye (42,000 hectares). Among the major nongrain crops,
the most
widely grown in 1987 were hay (870,000 hectares),
sunflowers
(455,000 hectares), potatoes (350,000 hectares), soybeans
(350,000
hectares), sugar beets (271,000 hectares), feed roots
(70,000
hectares), corn silage (50,000 hectares), and tobacco
(35,000
hectares). Wine and table grapes were widely grown, but
the best
vineyards were in Moldavia. Romania had gained a
reputation for
fine wines as early as the nineteenth century, and
subsequently
became one of the major producers of Europe.
Thanks to the increased use of fertilizers and
plant-protecting
chemicals and the expansion of arable land area through
irrigation
and drainage, grain output rose steadily from only 5
million tons
in 1950 to between 20 and 30 million tons in the 1980s.
How much
grain was produced in the late 1980s was unclear because
official
figures had become unreliable. The Romanian government
reported a
1987 grain harvest of more than 31.7 million tons, a
record amount
and far larger than the 1985 harvest of 23 million tons.
The United
States Department of Agriculture, however, estimated the
1987
harvest at only 18.6 million tons--well below the harvest
of 1985.
Data as of July 1989
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