Black grain spills from a funnel on to a 100-metre barge moored on the fast-flowing Danube.
Charlie Ashby, 64, negotiates in broken Romanian for its passage from his farm in the southwest of the country to Constanta on the Black Sea, one of Europe’s most strategic ports.
This is not the life Ashby, a farmer from Northamptonshire, once imagined for himself but in 2007, flicking through The Sunday Times, he stumbled on an advert for land in Romania. Frustrated by family politics and inspired by his grandfather, who went prospecting in Canada, he flew out that week.
Within months, he had 650 hectares on the Danube.
Almost two decades later that initial plot has grown to more than 10,000 hectares; the average size of a British farm is 82. The house Ashby built overlooks a pool and his own vineyard. On the horizon, mountain crags mark the Bulgarian border. He employs 80 staff and receives €1.8 million a year in European Union subsidies.
But now, like other foreign entrepreneurs who created successful agricultural businesses in Romania, everything he fought for is in jeopardy because of a rising tide of Romanian nationalism and a corporate scramble for land and water.
“For the first time as a foreigner out here, I’m starting to blink,” Ashby said.
When he first arrived in 2007, “it was like the Wild West”, he said. He was part of a group of a dozen foreign farmers — Italian, British, Spanish and Danish — drawn to the same southern town, Craiova, by undervalued land and Romania’s famous “black silt”, among the most fertile soils in the world.
They would meet at the local bar to discuss the latest drama in the delta. These included legal battles over land, community tensions, persistent dry weather and personal problems. Many, including Ashby, went through divorces. “There was no book on this,” said Ashby. “I felt like a fool for many years.”
The risks kept him up at night. Rival companies threatened him with physical violence and took him to court over land acquisitions (he won). Often he thought about returning to the UK. What kept him going was the promise of water.
A World Bank study estimates Romania has the largest irrigation potential in Europe. In the communist era a vast network of canals carried water from the Danube across the Romanian plains and made the region a big producer of fruit and vegetables. That system long ago fell into disrepair but with investment, many believe it could become what Ukraine was before the Russians invaded: the breadbasket of Europe.
On Ashby’s land the old communist canals were filled with reeds, blocked pipes and derelict pumping stations. Betting that proper irrigation would triple his earnings, he raised €500,000 to restore the canals, and now irrigates one quarter of his 10,000 hectares. Last year, he achieved yields of corn four times the EU average.
Other foreign farmers proved similarly successful, said Adam Oliver, a farm business consultant who leads the eastern Europe division of the agricultural property firm Brown & Co. “They acquired land, built businesses almost from scratch, were very entrepreneurial, and happy to take certain levels of risk.”
Romanian farmers often resented their scale. Ramona Duminicioiu, a smallholder and president of the farming union Eco Ruralis, accused the foreign farmers of land grabbing and “transforming villages into ghettos” by employing fewer people than their labour-intensive predecessors. But for Oliver, they invested and proved the case for modern, productive farming in Romania.
Now bigger players want in. Large agricultural firms from UAE, Denmark, India and Germany own vast tracts of Romanian land and want more. Estimates of foreign-owned land vary between 7.5 and 40 per cent of the total. It is impossible to know exactly, because there is no land registry in Romania.
“There’s a general increased interest in Romanian farmland from investors,” Oliver said. Land is four times cheaper than in the UK and Germany and demand for food is increasing because of a growing global population and the threat of water shortages affecting yields elsewhere.
And this is happening at the very moment when the political environment in Romania is tilting in a new, uncertain direction that could drive down the price of foreign-cultivated land.
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When the right-wing populist Calin Georgescu won the first round of the Romanian presidential elections in December, he campaigned on a nationalist agenda, including vowing to seize foreign companies. “He is a nationalist who says foreigners have taken our riches,” said Ana Otilia Nutu, a policy analyst at Expert Forum, a Romanian think tank. Georgescu proved highly effective at fanning that sense of grievance for political gain, she added. “You take a frustration that already exists and you pour on gas and light it.”
Georgescu’s victory was annulled by Romania’s constitutional court after intelligence revealed that Russia had helped his campaign. He was arrested and banned from contesting the rerun of the election in May.
But Nutu said that the popularity of the far-right message endured. Two extremist parties, Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and Georgescu’s Party of Young People (POT), have teamed up to consolidate votes. The threat to foreign businessmen has not dissipated.
Late last year Ashby went to see a neighbouring farmer, a deputy mayor, about a border dispute. Ashby had built a trench to prevent the neighbour cutting across his field. As soon as Ashby stepped out of his Land Rover, he could see that the neighbour and his workers were agitated. They attacked and beat him until a farm worker appeared and stopped the fight, bundling him into the Land Rover and driving to safety.
Ashby is certain there is a link between the incident and the heated political environment: “Georgescu has emboldened people like him. I’ve had problems with him before and he’s been itching to hit me. This time he lost control.”
This shifting landscape is forcing foreign farmers to consider leaving Romania, just as their investment over many years is poised to bear greater fruit.
Ashby knows the tide is against him. If nationalist policies do not force him out on their own he fears that corporate muscle will. The two threats may even fuse, with the political turbulence driving down prices and playing into the hands of big international firms who are better able to absorb the short-term risk and will be able to buy up the foreign farmers’ land cheaply. “The best land will end up corporate,” said Ashby.
Now nearing retirement, he is weighing his next move. One company wants him to spearhead farming in Libya or the Democratic Republic of Congo. But that, he thinks, might be one adventure too many.
