Farming land investors go west

Less than 5% of the arable land in Romania have been the object of buy-sell transactions in the last six years, with investors chiefly targeting Western Romania, and the Timis County above all. The total land outside localities traded throughout 1998-2004 has reached 355,725 ha (about six times the size of Insula Mare a Brailei, the company that owns the largest expanse of farming land in Romania), a report of the Agriculture Ministry shows. The average price per ha, according to the same survey, is 9.23 million ROL (230 euros), with transactions therefore totalling almost 3,300bn ROL (82 million euros. Nearly 80% of this land were sold to foreign investors; the low appetite of domestic investors in this regard is somewhat due to the fact that they have large stretches of land leased from the State Domains Agency. ZF