INTRODUCTION
Agriculture is one of the oldest human activities and has an important role in global economy by its generated economic resources. The International Accounting Standard IAS 41
-Agriculture dose not treat problems of agricultural lands and intangible agricultural assets, because these issues are presented in IAS16 standard (or LAS 40), respectively IAS 38. IAS41 does not contain specific information related to how often one should evaluate biological assets, deducing that the evaluation must be conducted on each closing date, because there are on existent regulations to stipulate a less frequent evaluation of biological assets.
The fair value estimation for agricultural produce at the harvesting point is strictly controlled compared to biological assets (according to IAS 41). Therefore, harvested cereal, animal sacrifice, picked fruits will be estimated; the estimation at production costs, due to exceptional circumstances, is not possible, as compared to biological assets. IASB states its premises, which states that there is an active market and a suited price for agricultural produce. Therefore, for agricultural harvested produce held as inventories, the fair value (minus point of sale costs) is actually the initial value correspondent to the acquisition costs or production costs (according to IAS 20).
MATERIALS AND METHODS
IAS 41 deals with the management of biological assets transformation, considering logging, orcharding, plantations, horticulture and aquaculture. This standard will apply for the accounting of the following elements, as they refer only to agricultural activities:
a) Biological assets – plants or living animals. The transformation process creates the processes of growing, anatomic degradation of living cells, production or breeding, which cause quality or quantity alteration of the biological assets. A biological assets or an agricultural produce are accounted only if the economic entity controls the asset due to previous events, and the future economic benefits generated by the asset are obtained by the entity, where the fair value or cost can be realistically estimated. A biological asset is evaluated on the initial accounting and on the year-end accounts, at its fair value, minus sale costs.
b) The agricultural produce at the harvesting point is actually the harvested and the biological asset of the company. The harvest is the detachment of produce from the biological asset, or ceasing the vital processes of a biological asset. The harvested agricultural produce must be evaluated and accounted on basis of the results, at its fair values, minus sale costs during harvest. According to LAS 2 – Inventories, this estimation leads to the input cost for the harvest estimation. In this care, the fair value is estimated in the following order:
- Current price existent on an active market
- Most recent transaction price
- Current market price for similar asset or products, considering possible dissimilarities
- Sector references
There are situations where there is on reference price or value for a biological asset; in this circumstance the fair value will be calculated as updated value of asset’ net expected cash flows. This standard implies that there is always a realistic way of determining fair value; if not, one will consider applying the amortized cost as replacement for the fair value.