Böll·Europe Podcast #18 | Soil Atlas 2024 (Part 2)

Soil as a commodity

With soaring land prices, small family farms can barely survive on their yields. Buying or leasing additional land is becoming impossible for most farmers. The “death of farms” is accelerating particularly quickly where large investors from outside the agricultural sector have discovered land as an object of speculation. Particularly in Eastern Europe, farmers are often outbid by non-agricultural investors, as we can see in Romania and Hungary. The statistics show that ever fewer owners now own ever larger areas of land. Oligarchs in Hungary are taking advantage of the situation with serve consequences, as a research of the New York Times shows.

A Böll·Europe Podcast episode with: Jobst Jungehülsing, agricultural engineer and former Head of Division at the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Berlin Atila Szocs, Eco Ruralis, Romania Benjamin Novak, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Former Journalist New York Times, Budapest

Links: - New Soil Atlas 2024: Facts and figures about a vital resource, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and TMG Think Tank for Sustainability, November 2024

• New York Times Article “Land grabbing in central Europe”
• Study: “Rabobank vs. Eastern European peasants: the land grabbing side of EU banking” on land speculation in Romania, by ACCSESTOLAND, NGO,
• Article: “Welfare for the rich”: how farm subsidies wrecked Europe’s landscapes", Guardian, 2024
• Article: “Climate crisis leaves European farmers vulnerable to far right, say campaigners", Guardian, November 2024

Podcast episode team:

• Author: Peter Kreysler
• Production: MonoBeat
• Editing: Lena Luig
• Speaker: Marianna Evenstein and Warner Poland