Month: October 2015

Latest from EU Member States

Working for Land Rights in Romania

October 12, 2015 ARC

By Attila Szocs, Eco Ruralis Land Rights Campaigner Land grabbing in Romania is reaching a blatant level but mobilisation against it is scaling up too. On the 26-27th of September, 2015, Eco Ruralis hosted in Cluj Napoca the first meeting of a newly established Working Group on the Right to Land. During the gathering, Eco Ruralis members and supporters debated important land related problems faced by peasants and agroecological food producers: lack of transparency behind large land acquisitions, equitable access to land for young and future farmers and land policies oriented towards land concentration. The meeting specified future collaboration by the group in order to intervene on the issue of land grabbing and fair access to land in Romania. Defining land grabbing generated an interesting debate inside the group. Several criteria were raised, taking into consideration quantitative and qualitative indicators of what is a land grab. First of all, we noted the duality of the Romanian countryside, where more than half of the available lands are cultivated by small farmers, while the other part is controlled by companies and other actors. This obviously opens up […]

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Visiting the Vine and Wine World of Moldova

October 12, 2015 ARC

Written By:  Derek Freitas, Eco Ruralis Staff The Republic of Moldova is the 22nd largest wine-producing country in the world. For such a small country, it certainly grows a lot of grapes. Agritourism is on the rise and so is the market for its wines all across Europe but are there enough economic opportunities for small-scale producers? And how does the export focus of the national government affect the genetic diversity of grapes? Recently, Eco Ruralis staff made a visit to find out more. The land of the Republic of Moldova has a long and rich history of grape and wine production dating back to the Dacian times. The first grape vines were here around 7,000 BCE and for 5,000 years wine has been made – so, they are pretty good at it! Generations and generations of people living in the countryside have produced wine for family consumption and local trade which is still the case today. There are 4 historical wine regions: Valul lui Traian (south west), Stefan Voda (south east), Codru (central), and […]

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Ecological Focus Area (EFA) in Germany: good for biodiversity & the tax payer?

October 12, 2015 Sebastian Lakner

Ecological Focus Areas (EFAs) were supposed to be a core part of the greening of CAP: public goods – biodiversity protection – for public money – the citizens tax revenue. However EFAs were watered down to the point of near meaninglessness, we argued here in 2014. In this guest blog post by Sebastian Lakner, the poor biodiversity performance of EFAs in Germany is outlined. […]

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250,000 people protest against TTIP in Berlin

October 11, 2015 ARC

250,000 took it to the streets on 10. october in Berlin for a huge ‘Stop TTIP and CETA – For a Fair World Trade!’ demonstration. Together many people from all walks of life protested against the free trade agreements between the EU and the US and Canada. […]

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Fresh recruits for Growing Livelihoods

October 4, 2015 Peter Crosskey

The UK’s Growing Livelihoods scheme to foster smaller-scale food growing has added a further five projects to the pilot phase it launched last year. The new arrivals in the Growing Livelihoods family are Bristol’s Beacon Farms, the Cwm Harry Cultivate group in south Wales, Cloughmills Community Action Team in Northern Ireland, the Cornish Tamar Grow Local group and Falkland Small Growers in Fife. The Tamar Grow Local group will convert an agricultural building into a shared packhouse, meeting space and office. This will extend the existing support for new market gardeners, who will be able to work together and establish new routes to market. With the Falkland Estate earning organic certification in May this year, two new businesses have been set up to establish a network of local growers. Falkland Kitchen Farm and Meadowsweet Organics are part of a plan to share equipment and services such as marketing organic crops. Cloughmills Community Action Team is building a geodesic dome, like the Eden Project, in which hydroponic salad crops will be grown, alongside mushrooms raised on […]