Romania recorded in 2025 its best wheat year since 1997. And yet, in the first quarter of 2026, the number of insolvencies in the agricultural sector increased by 181.8% compared to the same period of the previous year — from 11 to 31 cases. The share of agriculture in total insolvency proceedings rose from 9.6% in Q1 2025 to 20.7% in Q1 2026. Data published by INFINEXA, a company specialized in restructuring distressed businesses, show that agriculture is not following the general trend of the economy, but exceeding it sixfold. The 31 companies that entered insolvency generated a combined turnover of approximately 1.68 billion lei and had 953 employees at the time the proceedings were opened.

The causes identified by INFINEXA are structural, not cyclical. Mircea Șomlea, Senior Partner of the company, describes a pattern that repeats across all mandates: external price shocks that destroyed the assumptions underlying financing, banking structures sized for favorable cycle revenues, endemic climate risk not offset by risk management tools, and the complete absence of price hedging or crop diversification. To these is added a new and extremely serious factor: after the permanent shutdown of Azomureș in November 2025, Romania became the only country in the European Union without domestic fertilizer production.

This vulnerability was immediately tested. On February 28, 2026, air strikes on Iran and the control of the Strait of Hormuz by Iranian forces disrupted a route through which 30–46% of global trade in nitrogen fertilizers transits. The price of urea increased by 49% within a few weeks, while European natural gas rose by 62%. For Romanian farmers, any disruption in global supply chains is transmitted fully and without any buffer into production costs. INFINEXA’s analysis highlights that a good harvest cannot reverse three years of accumulated losses and debts postponed through moratoria, which became simultaneously due in August 2025.

The message of the analysis is explicitly addressed to decision-makers in the sector: the problems cannot be solved through ad hoc subsidies, but through a structural rebuilding of farm resilience — crop diversification, price risk management tools, access to sufficient working capital to sustain production from sowing to sale, and a coherent national policy on the production of strategic inputs, especially fertilizers.

(Photo: Magnific)