On the unpaved streets of Zarand, a village in Western Romania where hundreds of subsistence farmers scratch a living on tiny plots of land, everyone is telling the same story. In hushed tones, they tell how hundreds of hectares of farmland have been stolen from local families by a corrupt mafia, leaving them with no kind of income and no access to the food source they almost wholly relied on. How it happened, few of them know, but they are aware of one thing: it now belongs to foreign-owned companies, and those companies have little interest in farming.Zarand is one of over 50 Romanian villages where the Dutch banking giant Rabobank now owns large tracts of land, as part of a 315-million-euro ($337-million) investment into farmland in Romania and Poland. Through subsidiaries belonging to a farmland investment fund called Rabo Farm, Rabobank have bought up at least 140 hectares in Zarand since 2011, and over 21,000 hectares in Romania as a whole. In 10 to 15 years, the fund plans to sell at a profit of over 900 million euros, in line with the rapidly soaring price of land in Eastern Europe.
Source: Rabobank raids rural Romania | Europe | DW.COM | 12.11.2015






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