Globalization and European integration could be advantages for the development of agriculture in Romania, which still holds a high relative position in the economy and has structures of business organization and employment that do not match the European model. Based on the empirical analysis of available data, the paper presents changes of the Romanian agriculture in the last two decades and their influence on the whole economy, by pointing out three important fields of macroeconomic fluctuations: gross domestic product, prices and employment. The extended size of the subsistence component in the agricultural sector keeps the dependence of production variations on the natural conditions, strongly influenced by climate changes, while inducing significant variations in the GDP, but is also a solution to soften the social effects of the economic crisis.