The District Council announces that Ungheni is one of the two districts chosen nationwide for a three-year pilot project, funded by Italy, that prepares small and medium-sized farmers for European rules. The project has 4 million euros for the whole country; how farmers can sign up has not yet been announced.
The farmers' protest against the rise in agricultural VAT reached the border of Ungheni district on 25 June: farm machinery blocked access to the Sculeni border crossing, along with three other customs points and several national roads. According to the Border Police, traffic at Sculeni was restored only around 6 p.m. It is the official-source confirmation of what we had flagged as possible: the protest touched Ungheni directly.
The “Forța Fermierilor” (Farmers' Force) association has called a nationwide protest for Wednesday, 24 June, with agricultural machinery on the country's roads, after talks with the Finance Ministry hit a dead end. The stake: the government wants to raise farm VAT from 8% to 20% starting 1 October. It sounds like a budget line — until a farmer from Valea Mare, Ungheni district, shows what it does to 2,000 hectares of grain. The exact protest locations had not yet been announced; that it would also reach Ungheni district we could not confirm at a primary source.
At the government, Prime Minister Alexandru Munteanu met farmers and spoke about access to finance, seasonal labour, taxation and the insolvency law. It sounds abstract — until you put it on the map of the Ungheni district: nearly 17,000 hectares of cereals, 10,000 of sunflower, a sector grown to 30,000 hectares, yet carried on the backs of small producers. And on the ground, in Pârlița and Măgurele, town halls are recording drought damage and striking inactive farms off the registers.
Parliament has cleared the way for negotiations on a new European loan of 150 million euros, «Livada Moldovei II», for horticulture, viticulture and irrigation. The money is plentiful, but it comes as a loan, not a gift — and the first programme absorbed only three quarters of its funds. For the Ungheni district, where the area of orchards has fallen by a fifth in a decade, the real question is not how much is given nationally, but whether the money reaches here too.
The government has approved an agricultural subsidy programme for 2026–2030 under which the annual fund grows from 2.3 to 5.3 billion lei. Nearly three quarters of the money goes to investment rather than per-head livestock payments, and the new EU-style conditions require farmers to keep records that many small producers simply don't have. For a farming, largely rural district like Ungheni, the subsidy becomes a tool for modernisation — but also a filter.
