THE RURAL POLICY OF SLOVAKIA AFTER JOINING THE EU

Measures are grouped in line with the axes such as: increasing the competitiveness of the agricultural and forestry sector, improving the environment, the quality of life in rural areas and the diversification of the rural economy to which it is directed assistance exclusively from the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. The research approach applied when examining research phenomena was a combined approach by mixing several classical research methods (synthesis, deduction, analysis, comparison) and empirical results obtained by processing secondary data from database of the Ministry of Agriculture of the Slovak Republic, European Commission etc. CURRENT STATE OF THE KNOWLEDGE IN THE LITERATURE Agriculture represents an indispensable production process that is beneficial substantially to every society and economy (Johnston and Mellor, 1961; Melovic et al., 2020a; Sinabell, 2009) and remains an essential driver of the rural areas of the European Union (Bournaris et al., 2016). The market is very large, he highlighted its slow growth, and pointed out that contribution to economy indicated a negative trend in rice production, the results showed a very sharp decrease during 1971-2008, the efficiency of other food crops subsector production (beans, corn, vegetables and fruits and other food crops) shows an increase in efficiency.