“Let’s not parody the Romanian village!”

The first Meat.Milk. edition of 2026 brings Daniel Botanoiu alongside us—an agronomy engineer and PhD in agricultural sciences, former Secretary of State at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development for over seven years, and advisor in the Prime Minister’s Chancellery on agriculture and the food industry. A name that has crossed Romanian agriculture from multiple positions: from fieldwork and profession, from politics, to public administration and the associative environment.

In this Meat.Milk. edition, Daniel Botanoiu starts the dialogue from a simple and powerful place: the village of his childhood, with its quiet labor, with people who did their duty without asking for applause, with a sense of normality that shaped character. It is the discreet explanation for a type of professionalism which, in agriculture, is hard to build and easy to lose.

Botanoiu places at the center of the discussion one of the most sensitive issues of Romanian administration: when legislation becomes bloated and stretches to dozens of pages, it no longer helps—it slows things down. And agriculture feels this difference first, because time on the farm is not measured in procedures, but in seasons, investments, and real risks.

In the second part of the program, Daniel Botanoiu points to several benchmarks that speak about the present and the future: long-term credit as a development tool, predictable rules for land leasing and consolidation, water and soil management as national infrastructure, and research connected to the real needs of farmers. These are technical topics, but their essence is human: without stability and functional instruments, the pressure always falls on those who work and take responsibility, not on those who draft the rules.

Beyond positions and stages, the essence remains: Daniel Botanoiu speaks as a man of real agriculture, for whom public decision-making is not about image, but about responsibility. A dialogue about how to build for the long term, with respect for work, for people, and for a Romania that produces.