Sectors
Five markets we know from both sides.
Topics
Five questions that cut across every market.
Services
Economic analysis for governments, donors and international organisations: we diagnose sectors and public spending, design and cost programmes, and evaluate what they changed.Economic analysis for companies and investors: we size markets and plan entry, find and assess firms to buy, and model what a business is worth.
Sector
Evidence
What a hectare earns is where farm policy and farm investment meet. A Serbian hectare produces a little over half the value added of an EU hectare, and much of the gap lies in what is grown: orchards and vineyards take about eight in every hundred hectares of cropland, yet bring in more than thirty in every hundred euros of crop output.
How muchfarm value added per hectare of farmland, EU = 100, average 2019–2023Serbia 58EU 100
From whatorchards and vineyards, of every 100hectares of cropland 8euros of crop output 31
Eurostat, national accounts and crop statistics, 2019–2023; Fiscal Council of Serbia (2026), structure of crop production
Context
For ministries and development programmesFor processors, traders and investors
Serbia is a farm country with a surplus in food trade. Its land earns far less than a European hectare, largely because so much of it grows cereals, and its best-known fruit leaves frozen in bulk, as an ingredient for processors abroad. Farms are small and their owners ageing, and the sector is held back less by demand than by how the farm budget is spent, by thin investment in irrigation and orchards, and by weak organisation.
Public money for farming is paid mostly by the hectare, the head and the litre, and much more of it than in the EU is tied to current output. It supports rural incomes but rewards area and volume more than a better yield, a higher grade or a contract with a buyer. The part that builds capacity, irrigation, advice, storage and standards, is small and unstable, and EU funds meant for it are drawn slowly. Yet the firms that organise growers, supplying inputs and buying under contract, already reach small farms in the least developed areas, and support that works through them can go further. The question for policy is how the same budget could raise what a hectare earns while still supporting those who rely on it.
We have reviewed Serbia’s agricultural policy for the OECD’s competitiveness assessments and analysed its food industry for the ministry in charge of the economy, and we know the processors and traders that organise growers from their own accounts.
Raw material, not buyers, has become the constraint: plantations are old and exposed to frost and disease, growers are ageing and short of hands at harvest, and when prices run ahead, buyers switch to Polish or Ukrainian fruit. Most firms sell through cold stores and intermediaries rather than to retailers, and a processor carries a year of stock and the price risk. Value is created by securing supply through modern orchards and contracted growers, by storage that keeps fruit fresh for longer, by packing to the standards retailers require, and by higher-value forms such as dried fruit. Rules on trading practices and contracts with farmers belong in any plan.
We map such markets from trade data and the filed accounts of every firm in them, and know the farm support and EU funds a plan can draw on.
Direction
What we do here
Examples of our work
Official enterprise statistics and company accounts by detailed activity over a decade, trade data and a review of ministry, agency and donor programmes, set against five EU comparators. The four sectors are food, machinery and equipment, rubber and plastics, and wood and furniture.
Review of the fifteen draft chapters of the policy assessment for Serbia, from investment and competition to agriculture and the environment, against evidence from institutions and from the people the policies reach.
Review of draft chapters of the assessment and structured feedback from interviews with experts outside government, among other things on producer support, market information and the farm advisory service.
What we do here
Examples of our work
Official enterprise statistics and company accounts by detailed activity over a decade, trade data and a review of ministry, agency and donor programmes, set against five EU comparators. The four sectors are food, machinery and equipment, rubber and plastics, and wood and furniture.
Review of the fifteen draft chapters of the policy assessment for Serbia, from investment and competition to agriculture and the environment, against evidence from institutions and from the people the policies reach.
Review of draft chapters of the assessment and structured feedback from interviews with experts outside government, among other things on producer support, market information and the farm advisory service.
Earlier experience
Between 2016 and 2023, as executive director of a Belgrade economic think tank, Nemanja Šormaz worked on six agri-food projects, as coordinator, project manager, team leader or co-author.
A value-chain analysis of food and drink as a base for industrial policy, and a baseline of fruit and vegetable exporters that matched customs and registry data for every exporter and interviewed more than a hundred firms.
Four annual rounds compared supported and unsupported firms through surveys of 230 to 300 companies and interviews with partners. A closing evaluation traced what had changed in the sector and why.
A sector diagnosis and a representative survey of more than 400 agri-food firms on markets, technology, finance and constraints, repeated a year later.
Scenario assessments of food waste and a review of agri-food against the EU’s green rules, based on interviews and a firm survey.
The other side
Where land earns most, and who can capture the value.How farm support could raise what a hectare earns.
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Company profile, PDF · Belgrade, Serbia