Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu met on 19 June, at the government, with a group of agricultural producers — representatives of the National Farmers’ Federation and the “Women for Resilient Agriculture” Association. On the table were the farm’s operational problems: risk management, access to finance on favourable terms, labour for seasonal work and the Day-Labourers Law, the fiscal policy now under consultation, reporting and data digitalization, and adjustments to the Insolvency Law and the Enforcement Code, which farmers complain is burdensome. “Farmers are not asking for the impossible. They want predictability, fair rules and constant dialogue,” the PM summed up.
The list sounds technical and remote. It becomes concrete the moment you put it on the map of a district like Ungheni.
How agricultural Ungheni really is
The National Bureau of Statistics figures for 2025 show a district built on the land. Nearly 17,000 hectares (16,889 to be exact) are sown with cereals and legumes, of which 9,220 hectares with wheat and 6,500 with maize. Sunflower alone takes up 10,010 hectares. Far from shrinking, the district’s sown area grew over two decades from 19,408 hectares (2007) to 29,936 hectares (2025). To these are added 1,162 hectares of orchards and 238 of vineyards.
But it is a sector carried, in good part, by small people. The district’s livestock is overwhelmingly held by household farms, not by enterprises: of the 18,161 sheep and goats, 97% are in people’s yards. This is exactly the profile — many small, lightly formalized producers — for which the topics from the meeting with the PM (access to finance, reporting, digitalization) are not bureaucracy but the line that separates “you catch some support” from “you are left out.”
Drought is not a word: it is in the town halls’ acts
How real the “risk management” discussed at the government is can be seen in the State Register of Local Acts. The Pârlița and Măgurele town halls in the Ungheni district set up commissions to assess the degree of drought damage to crops — procedures you do not start if all is well in the field.
And the calendar overlaps exactly with the present. The national compensation scheme for the 2025 drought, opened by the Ministry of Agriculture, covers precisely maize and sunflower — that is, two of Ungheni’s staple crops — damaged by at least 50%, with a submission deadline that expires on 22 June itself. Across the country, 792 assessment reports were drawn up for more than 56,000 hectares. How many of them are from the Ungheni district cannot yet be said: the breakdown by district is not public.
The farms that drop off the registers
The meeting’s second topic — reporting and digitalization in agriculture — also has a local, less comfortable counterpart. Also through local acts, town halls in the district strike inactive peasant (farmer) households off the register. In other words, the filter on which access to money depends is already being applied: those who are not active and formalized disappear from the records — exactly the mechanism described in the new 2026–2030 subsidies programme, which shifts the emphasis from “owning land” to “investing and reporting.”
Calm at the table, tension in the field
The government’s statement describes a measured dialogue. The reality on the ground is harsher: farmers have repeatedly taken to the streets, including in Ungheni district — driving their tractors out against the VAT jump and blocking the Sculeni border crossing on 25 June — with complaints about compensation, debts to banks and suppliers, and the risk of insolvency. That is precisely why the adjustment of the Insolvency Law, explicitly requested at the government, is not a legal detail but a matter of survival for indebted farms.
For Ungheni, the stake of this meeting is not a new promise but whether the words at the table reach the farmer in Pârlița or Sculeni — the same one concerned by the 150-million-euro loan under the “Livada Moldovei 2” programme and by tomorrow’s EU-style subsidies.
What can be heard only in the field
How much the Ungheni district actually received in subsidies and how many farmers from here applied for the drought aid remain figures that the Agency for Intervention and Payments in Agriculture does not publish broken down by district. Likewise, the voice of Ungheni’s producers on the topics put on the table at the government is missing from the official statement — and it is heard best in the field, not in the meeting room.
The topics of the meeting come from the official government statement of 19 June 2026. The agricultural figures for the Ungheni district are from the National Bureau of Statistics database (2025 data, agricultural enterprises and peasant farms). The drought assessments and farm strike-offs come from the State Register of Local Acts; the compensation scheme, from the Ministry of Agriculture’s communications. The district-level data on subsidies and drought cases were not public at the time of writing.