The ministry of agriculture car accelerated out of Bucharest and into the countryside, its speed camera detector at the ready. At the foot of the Carpathian mountains, discreet stakes indicated a field of the US seed company Pioneer’s genetically modified maize. The giant skeletons of abandoned steel factories lay amid hundreds of hectares of Agro Invest cereal crops, and immense hoardings advertised the Romanian agribusiness company’s appetite for “chernozem”, the black topsoil that is the most fertile land in Europe. “Look, it’s you!” said Gabriel Garban, director of communications at the Paying Agency for Rural Development and Fishery, as we passed a gleaming Michelin tyre factory. A little further on, a kestrel eyed an old peasant farmer sitting in long grass, his scythe by his side. He was reading a book, glancing up to keep an eye on his one cow. “He is cultivating his mind,” said Garban, reminding us of the words of the Romanian philosopher Lucian Blaga: “Eternity was born in the village.”

When we reached Sercaia in the centre of the country, eternity had put its foot on the accelerator. “The National Rural Development Programme (NRDP) is coming to your village,” announced a poster on the door of the town hall. In a tent at the football stadium six uniformed Europeanisation agents were giving a PowerPoint presentation on financing a dairy farm. Since 2007 Romania has been a beneficiary of the European Agriculture Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD), which is co-funding the initiative. The plan is to convert the 3.5 million Romanians who farm less than a hectare of land into entrepreneurs. The number of peasant farmers in Romania has reached a European record — 30% of the economically active population, compared with 28% in 1989. The collapse of Communism and the contraction of the industrial sector sent people back to the land. Property is often divided up among family members, and the average holding is two hectares, compared with 55 in France.

“The farmer we just passed typifies Romanian agriculture. He is uncompetitive,” said Garban. “How are you going to break into the European market with just five litres of milk?” His answer would be to attend the NRDP presentation, like the 30 Sercaia residents who had come along. “It’s very important to convince opinion leaders. The priest and the primary school teacher have both come,” said Garban’s colleague, Catalina Musat. The screen showed the financial operational targets that would allow a farmer to produce 24,000kg of tomatoes in five years in return for an investment of €23,754, of which €7,400 is a non-repayable government grant. Musat added: “Small farmers are not the potential beneficiaries though. We are aiming this more at people who want to start a business.”

‘I couldn’t care less’

People like agronomist Alexandru Strâmtu, 31, who showed us round his new organic blueberry farm. The EU provided half the funding — €300,000 — and he put up the other half. “I’m in debt but business is going well. I sell all the blueberries to a Portuguese company, which exports them to Germany, Chile. Sometimes I even see my fruit here.” But transporting them around the world is surely not very ecological? “Honestly, I couldn’t care less.”

Just outside Bârla, in the south, Hadi Khoury, 30, the Lebanese managing director of the Haditon group, welcomed us to his farm. He asked us to wear white overalls to prevent contamination of the 120,000 chickens kept in four buildings of the former collective farm (1). In association with 12 other businessmen, mostly from the Middle East, he produces a quarter of all the eggs eaten in Romania. “If you don’t have the stamp of the European Union, banks won’t even look at you. But if you do, they’ll come to you.” The EAFRD contributed €1m to the renovation.

“Romania’s fantastic,” he said. “These ex-Communist buildings cost me next to nothing, I pay my 25 employees very little, and the EU loans are substantial. The only problem is the Poles.” They are “unfair competition. They don’t have the same hygiene standards, and they get more subsidies than we do. That’s the problem with Europe — it’s great on modernisation and money, but we are all competing with each other.” The local MP and former secretary of state at the ministry of justice, Theodor Nicolescu, said: “Hadi’s success is an example to us all. Thanks to the European Union we are becoming competitive, and we are creating the conditions for the free market to operate and guide people’s behaviour.”

We spent the evening in a large room with a marble bathroom in a deserted tourist hotel set up with the support of the EAFRD. Garban and Musat said their parents had abandoned the family plot of land to work in the city, as physicists and fashion designers. Nonetheless, the gospodarie (house, courtyard, outbuildings and patch of land) remains a fundamental unit of social organisation. The ministry chauffeur, Ion Neagu, said he rented out his family’s three hectares to a farmer who was cultivating them in a partnership (2). “I’d rather beg in Paris than work the land,” he said, although he dreams of spending his retirement there.

The hotel’s cook disagreed: “I farm my gospodarie. I have pigs, chickens and cows. How else would I manage on my seasonal wages?” The young waitress said she was glad to get the benefit of her family’s plot, but wouldn’t dream of picking up a spade herself: “I don’t want to do my back in.” Attitudes are changing. As families lose interest in working the land, the culture of self-sufficiency is being abandoned.

A struggle to survive

Three hundred kilometres away at Vintu de Jos, far from the NRDP publicity tour, we met Teodor Vingarzan and his son Lucian. They are subsistence farmers, even though they have 50 hectares. Lucian, 34, an engineer, said he would rather work the family farm than earn, at best, €300 a month in town. His youngest son had to emigrate to the US to find work. Lucian invited us into the barn where he milked the oldest cow and handed us a bowl of warm milk. “There’s modernisation for you,” he said as he rinsed the bowl at the tap. “We only recently got running water.” The Vingarzans use the animal manure to fertilise their cereal crops, which they feed to their cattle. “At the end of the year we have a pig for Christmas, milk and eggs.”

It’s a struggle to survive, and Teodor blames the EU: “Our local produce is excellent, it is all organic, but we are being crushed by produce from western Europe. They are much more subsidised and mechanised, and so their food is cheaper than ours. I produce everything here but I can’t sell it. Go to the supermarket and you will see — the potatoes are German, Italian and French.” Vingarzan once believed in modernisation — immediately after Ceaușescu fell, he visited modern farms in Belgium, France and Austria. He was impressed, and decided to increase his family’s land (as land was being redistributed), buy equipment, and prosper. But “I was betrayed.”

When I met Achim Irimescu, secretary of state at the ministry of agriculture, in his office in Bucharest, I was surprised to hear him describe the merits of subsistence farming: “It plays a very important social role. This is a large number of people who are not unemployed, and who survive without asking the government for help.” This leading member of the Conservative Party does however want to “reintegrate them into the market and make them competitive through EU aid programmes for small farmers ... those who do not take action will disappear, because most are elderly peasants without anyone to pass their land onto. It’s the natural solution.” But when he described government measures — increasing the minimum size of farm that can apply for funding, making investment conditional on the accumulation of land — and pointed out that these laws have already reduced the numbers claiming direct payments by 300,000, the process did not seem quite so natural.

Competition is the solution advocated in Romania, as it was in France in the 1960s, by agricultural scientists and managers. Cristina Pocol, who teaches rural economy at the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Cluj-Napoca, listed what she describes as Romania’s handicaps, such as small parcels of land, low productivity and low mechanisation. She pointed to an apple orchard seen on television: “The operation is enormous, everything is computerised, the product is competitive. That’s the road we should take.”

Our produce is too dear

Convinced by travels to China and Germany, Tiberiu Biris tried to go down that road. He set up an apiary cooperative in Blaj, bringing together 200 producers and the latest technology. They package around 400 tons of honey a year, most of which is exported. “Romanians can’t buy Romanian honey,” Teodor Parau, who owns 200 hives, said with regret. “Our product is too expensive. It is bought by big western importers.” The middlemen keep the prices so low that Biris fears he may have to close down the cooperative. The honey is competitive though — around half the price of honey from western Europe.

One of the paradoxes of agrarian liberalism in Romania is that farmers are gaining market share abroad but cannot feed their own people: 70% of food is imported. Driven by the EU, distorted competition has favoured the rise of agriculture for export. In 10 years, almost 1m hectares, or 6.5% of usable agricultural land (3), has passed into the hands of foreign investors. EU subsidies, low property prices and cheap labour are concentrating the business into the hands of a few. In 2013 the government introduced a bill freeing up the sale of land. A year ago the agriculture minister, Daniel Constantin, had to explain why he owed one of the biggest industrial farm owners in the country several hundred thousand euros (4). Two of Constantin’s predecessors, Valeriu Tabără and Stelian Fuia, worked for the multinational Monsanto.

Conflicts of interest are obvious and the political policy clear: in return for agreements signed with the International Monetary Fund in 2009 and 2011, the Romanian government cut 200,000 public sector jobs, reduced public sector salaries by a quarter and raised VAT to 24%. Pay is low and social protection weak, driving Romanians to emigrate. In 2007 around 12% of Romanians worked abroad, mostly in low-skilled jobs.

As if nothing has been learnt, the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has brought Romania the same policies adopted by western Europe in the 1960s. But at that time the issue of self-sufficiency had been settled, and the labour market was able to absorb unskilled workers from the countryside, who often did well in the city and moved up the social ladder. The contract the NRDP is proposing today in Romania — that peasants should apply to large institutions for funding — reinforces the established inequalities between small-scale and large-scale farms, and between subsistence farmers and industrial entrepreneurs better placed to get European funds.

This is not the first time rural Romania has seen prophets of “good practice” — from 1948 onwards the Communist Party’s propaganda department organised cinema tours of the countryside showing Soviet and domestic films extolling collectivisation.

Grow your own

“It makes me so sad to kill them,” said Cezara Fiţ, who teaches the history of music at Alba Iulia secondary school, as she contemplated 30 freshly killed chickens in her garden. Her husband, Iosif Fiţ, a member of the national union of composers, spread their home produce on the table: tomatoes, cucumbers, red wine and plum brandy. “The excellent local vegetables sold by the old ladies at the market are too expensive for us,” said Cezara. “The vegetables in the big supermarkets are affordable, but they have come from far away and are full of chemicals.”

The couple have been converted to the benefits of farming, which also helps one of their daughters, a teacher whose €180 a month earnings are not enough to pay her bills. Austerity measures imposed by international institutions encourage people to turn to self-sufficiency — in Greece, after the IMF’s rescue packages, tens of thousands of city dwellers returned to the land. Composers and teachers work the fields. “Ceaușescu could never have dreamed of this,” said Iosif.

Disgusted by what he sees as a corrupt political class, he thinks only a Malthusian disaster will sort things out. “A big global catastrophe would kill two or three billion people. The survivors would rebuild the world on more moral principles.” Vingarzan would like to see the return of royalty. Ramona Dominicioiu and Attila Szocs, activists with Eco Ruralis, the only Romanian organisation to defend small peasant farmers, try to raise funds to save tomato seeds and reject all politicians as corrupt.

Corruption, condemned by everyone, including President Traian Băsescu, who has made it one of his main concerns, makes it hard to see how the public authorities can find a solution; it also masks policies put in place for personal enrichment. The European Commission scolds Romania for how it uses EU funds, but does not question the course it is taking: “Membership of the European Union ... has been accompanied by extensive reforms which have contributed to the modernisation of the country, and Romanian citizens have been able to benefit from this,” said the Commission’s president José Manuel Barroso (5). The IMF believes the agreements it signed with Romania have been “crowned with success” (6).

Such brilliant political success was no doubt behind the appointment of Romania’s former agriculture minister Dacian Cioloș to the post of European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development in 2009, where he has just renegotiated reform of the CAP. Romanian peasants do not see this as a reason to be proud.