CROATIAN AGRICULTURE FROM THE VIEW OF THE RURAL POPULATION

Agriculture, as a significant economical component of Croatia's rural areas, is still based on relatively small agricultural estates, inadequate technological equipment and unfavourable educational structure of the farmers, as well as the inexperienced age groups involved in farming. Some additional problems can be found in the undeveloped market structure for the agricultural product, had marketing organization and the unsolved problem of farmland marketing. The aim of this article is to determine on the basis of a survey the level of people's satisfaction with the life in the country, that being one of the ways of lowering demographic pressure on urban areas. The satisfaction and the expectations of the participants in the survey indirectly affect the possibility of long-term investments, for example machinery and equipment investments as well as agricultural manufacturing projects. The survey was performed by method of sample which included 941 respondents in all districts of Croatia. The survey covered 941 housekeeping / respondents, out of which 67.3% were in the continental part, 11.9 % in the highland part, and 20.8 % in the Mediterranean part of Croatia. Over half of respondents (55.2%) have a landed property. The largest share of the economy is 2 to 5 hectares (43.4 %) and over 5 hectares (33.4 %) and the fewest were in the category of up to 2 ha (23.3%). In the next five years nearly half of the respondents (46.2%) intended to keep agricultural production at the same level, one quarter (25.2%) didn't know what would happen, one tenth would reduce it and 17.2 % is planning to increase it. Expected changes are often mutually related to the satisfaction with life in the country. Under one third of respondents (26.6%) believe that nowadays people in the country live well and very well. A significant portion of respondents (43.6%) thinks that life is average, nor good nor bad, and a third thinks that life is poor and very poor. A third or 33.9% of them think that five years from now life in the country in Croatia will be better, one fifth (22.3%) thinks that life will be even worse and most of them (43.8%) don't expect any changes.