Whose Soil? Capital, Patrimony, and the European Land Question
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 In the summer of 2018, on the alluvial plain where the Danube splits to form what Romanians call the Great Island of Brăila, the operating rights to a 57,000-hectare farm changed hands for an estimated €230 million. The seller was a Romanian entrepreneur, Constantin Dulute, who had built Agricost over two decades into the largest single contiguous farm in the European Union. The buyer was Al Dahra, a UAE-based agribusiness founded by Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, brother of the country’s president, and half-owned since 2020 by ADQ, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund. The land itself remained the property of the Romanian state, leased under a concession running to 2032 that the new operator inherited. What had been sold was not soil but the right to direct what the soil produced. More
