STIMULATING THE ATTRACTION OF INVESTMENTS IN THE PROCESSING SECTOR – A NECESSITY IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN MILK MARKET LIBERALIZATION

A main challenge for the players on the world dairy market is to efficiently respond to the changes of the local markets characteristics, in the context of an increasingly fierce competition for the raw milk obtained on the farms. From the analysis, it results that the performance of the Romanian milk sector is seriously affected by the excessive fragmentation of supply, which reveals the subsistence and semi-subsistence phenomenon that persists in the milk sector, as the main factor that constrains competitiveness growth. In reference to the volume of investments in the dairy processing sector, it results that this had a slow growth rate in the investigated period, the share in total investments in the food sector ranging from 7.8% (2000) to 16.9% (2011). The investments in agriculture in total investments accounted for 4.9% in the year 2012. In order to adapt to the competition on the European Single Market, the Romanian sector has to receive support through investments, in the conditions in which there is a favourable global conjuncture for the consumption of dairy products, in which their prices are expected to raise on the basis of the increasing demand of the development regions.