TheMarketForIdeas

In the summer of 2018, on the alluvial plain where the Danube splits to form the Great Brăila Island (Insula Mare a Brăilei), the operating rights to one of the largest farms in Europe changed hands. Agricost cultivated roughly 56,000 to 57,000 hectares there under a concession from the Romanian state running to 2032, and the Abu Dhabi–based agribusiness Al Dahra acquired the company in a deal the seller valued at roughly €200 million to €250 million. The soil itself stayed Romanian state property; Al Dahra acquired control of the company holding the concession, and with it the authority to decide what those hectares would produce and where the proceeds would go.[1]

By 2026 that distinction had practical consequences. A cross-border investigation found that Al Nahyan- and ADQ-linked agricultural companies had collected more than €71 million in Common Agricultural Policy payments between 2019 and 2024, including €10.5 million in direct payments to Agricost in 2024 alone. The farm grows cereals and animal feed, some of it alfalfa bound for Gulf food-security supply chains. The arrangement leaves the Romanian state as owner, an Emirati-controlled company as operator, and the European Union as a source of subsidy.

The island owes its shape, and the state its title, to an earlier decision about what that ground was for. Until the 1960s the land between the two arms of the river was the Balta Brăilei, a floodplain of lakes and reed beds that the Danube covered every spring and that supported the largest natural fishery in Romania after the Delta. The communist regime embanked some 70,000 hectares of it, largely with the labor of political prisoners, and drained the marsh into a single state farm, removing the villages that stood in the way. Because the state had made those fields itself, they never went through the restitution that broke the rest of Romanian agriculture into millions of small holdings after 1989. The island stayed in public hands until the State Domains Agency granted it as a concession to a private operator. That history explains why there was a single company to buy in 2018, when an investor anywhere else in Romania would have had to assemble tens of thousands of parcels.[2] The families who had fished the Balta held a relationship to its water that no register recorded, but under a regime that tolerated no organized objection they had no standing to contest its disappearance.

Brăila draws attention because the parties and the scale are easy to see, but the larger European land question does not begin with the Gulf. The European Union counted 8.8 million agricultural holdings in 2023, around 5.6 million fewer than in 2005, although the area used for agriculture had fallen by only 0.6 percent over the same period. Farms under five hectares accounted for 4.9 million of that decline, and the number of farms above one hundred hectares actually rose by some 75,000, so that fewer holders now direct essentially the same land.[3] Consolidation on that scale follows from a presumption, built into the European market as older restrictions on nationality and capital movement were dismantled, that land can be traded and financed like any other asset, even though it is finite and fixed in place. Europe had good reasons to dismantle those restrictions, many of which protected privilege more than they protected land. Yet making land easier to trade does not make it less scarce. Over time, the accumulation of individually ordinary transactions brings back a political question that market rules do not settle: who should have standing to decide what a particular piece of ground is for?

Europe’s older land orders recognized claims that the modern market tends to treat as secondary, while European law determines how far those claims can limit a sale or investment. Brăila, the Berry (a historic province of central France, roughly the present departments of Cher and Indre), and Vectr’s Romanian expansion are unusually well documented because they are large or foreign, which also makes them far more likely to attract investigative reporting than the ordinary sales through which most consolidation occurs. Several of the underlying accounts come from farmers’ unions or governments with a stake in the outcome, and the notes identify those claims. They illustrate how control separates from title and how European law weighs competing claims, but they do not establish how common those patterns are; the Eurostat and Commission figures are better suited to that question.

I. The patrimonial premise

Europe’s older land orders did not share a single legal theory of land, and treating them as though they did would erase important distinctions among institutions with very different rules and social relations. For example, a Polish noble estate had little in common with an Italian mezzadria, even though both belonged to social orders that could preserve continuity while also entrenching hierarchy, enclosure, and dispossession. What these arrangements shared was an assumption more than a doctrine: land carried relationships beyond exchange, so that residence and customary use could bear on the right to work it. Some of those relationships protected the weak, as common grazing rights did for a landless household with a single cow. Many others held people down; the labor dues that bound a Polish or Russian peasant to his lord’s estate are the obvious example. Preserving the first kind of relationship does not require restoring the second.

Patrimony describes claims on land that arise from relationships other than purchase alone. A farm passed from one generation to the next is an asset, but it also ties a household to the same place across generations, and the person who inherits it receives more than a marketable title. Residence, labor, and long tenancy can create different kinds of standing; for example, a daughter who inherits a vineyard and a tenant who has worked the neighboring parcel for twenty years hold very different rights, yet neither relationship begins with a purchase. Those claims exist before a sale and do not disappear simply because a sale occurs. The same pattern appears in hedgerows and terraces maintained across generations for reasons that would make little sense if every feature were judged by its present return.

In The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andrić shows how use and memory can create claims that formal ownership does not capture. The bridge at Višegrad was commissioned by Mehmed Paša Sokolović as an imperial project and built without local consent, but over time it became part of the town’s own life. The town, Andrić writes, “owed its existence to the bridge and grew out of it as if from an imperishable root.” Over the centuries its children learn the bridge’s legends before they can remember learning anything, and its weddings and funerals pause on the kapia. The bridge’s imperial origins remain, but generations of use and memory give the townspeople claims that no title register could record. A cadastral entry for a Romanian field or a French vineyard likewise identifies an owner without describing all of the relationships that have accumulated around the land.[4]

The older land orders also entrenched hierarchy and protected incumbents who did not deserve protection, so their history is no argument for replacing property with patrimony. A person’s relationship to a piece of ground may have political significance beyond the market value of his title. Changes in ownership and use can eliminate a farming class or reorganize a countryside around owners who no longer live in it. Each transaction is private; their cumulative effect falls on the polity that has to live with the result. The embankment of the Balta Brăilei shows that a state can be as careless of these relationships as any market. Public ownership therefore offers no guarantee, and whatever recognition patrimony receives has to bind public authorities as well as private buyers. The state that drained the Balta in the 1960s is the same state that granted the island as a concession half a century later.

Modern property law starts from different needs. It allows land to be separated from the person who works it and control to be separated from title, so that a parcel may be owned by one company, operated by another, and financed by investors who have never seen it. Agriculture could not function well without such arrangements, since credit and retirement both depend on rights that can be transferred. The problem arises when competing claims can enter only as limits on a prior freedom to buy and sell. A village may care whether the fields around it stay divided among working farms, while a young farmer may need the next parcel that comes up for sale to make his holding viable. Under the modern order both interests must be justified against that prior freedom.

II. Article 63 and the burden of justification

European law gives those competing claims a definite order. Article 63 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union prohibits restrictions on capital movements between member states and, unusually among the fundamental freedoms, between member states and third countries.[5] Agricultural land falls within that rule, so cross-border investment in farmland begins from a presumption that it may proceed. European law does not therefore treat farmland as ordinary capital: the Commission’s 2017 interpretative communication calls agricultural land a “scarce and special asset” and accepts that member states may regulate its sale to prevent excessive speculation, preserve agricultural communities, and keep farming viable. Such measures still have to satisfy non-discrimination and proportionality, which means a government must show that a restriction is suitable and necessary and burdens investors no more than its objective requires.[6]

In Ospelt, decided in 2003, the Court accepted that the Austrian Land of Vorarlberg could require prior authorization for sales of agricultural land in order to preserve farming communities and keep land in agricultural use, aims it connected to the Common Agricultural Policy itself. At the same time, it held that authorization could not be refused in every case where the buyer would neither farm the land nor live on it, because the plots in question were leased to farmers who would go on working them whoever held the title.[7] The Court allowed Vorarlberg to regulate sales for the sake of farming communities while rejecting a blanket rule that would have ignored tenants already working the land. Fifteen years later, in SEGRO and Horváth, the Court held that Hungary’s cancellation, without compensation, of usufruct rights held by anyone who was not a close relative of the owner amounted to an unjustified and indirectly discriminatory restriction on capital. In 2019 it confirmed that finding in infringement proceedings and added a breach of the right to property under Article 17 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights.[8] Kinship says nothing about whether the holder of a right farms the land, so the Hungarian rule failed because it privileged a relationship with no bearing on its stated purpose. The two judgments leave room for a state to prefer working farmers and viable holdings, but only when the restriction actually serves that preference rather than simply excluding people the state would rather keep out.

The 2017 communication followed infringement proceedings that the Commission opened in 2015 against Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia, whose post-transition land laws required buyers to be long-term residents or qualified farmers and, in Hungary’s case, to farm the land themselves, while barring legal entities from buying it at all.[9] Rules of that kind discriminate against other Europeans by construction, which is what several of them were designed to do. Restrictions also carry costs, since a retiring farmer’s land is often his pension and narrowing the pool of permitted buyers can reduce the price he receives. In the Berry, according to the local farmers’ union, sellers near retirement received two or three times the going rate from Chinese investors, even if their neighbors disliked the buyer.[10] Restrictions can also protect incumbents against newcomers. A land market frozen in the hands of existing families serves a young farmer worse than a liquid one in which he can at least find land to lease. Those costs argue against blanket restrictions, but not against giving tenants or nearby farmers some standing before a sale closes.

The single market changes the order in which claims are heard. Governments can still create pre-emption rights and approval procedures, but those restrictions must be justified after the freedom to transact has already been recognized. Consolidation follows from that arrangement without any foreign buyer or forced transfer. An older farmer retires, the neighboring operation buys his parcel and spreads its machinery across more hectares, and one farm disappears although every hectare stays in cultivation. No court orders that outcome, and no treaty requires a small farm to close. In practice, that process tends to favor buyers who already possess the capital and scale to keep acquiring, which is consistent with the pattern in the Eurostat figures.

III. Concentration before foreignness

Price is one source of concentration. The average hectare of arable land in the European Union sold for an estimated €15,224 in 2024, up 6.1 percent on the previous year. National averages ranged from €4,825 in Latvia to €96,608 in the Netherlands and more than €201,000 in Malta. Rents averaged €295 per hectare a year across the Union but reached €941 in the Netherlands.[11] Prices at that level reflect more than agricultural output alone and favor buyers who can borrow on better terms than a young farmer can.

Demography compounds the problem. Eurostat’s 2020 census figures, cited in the European Parliament’s report on generational renewal, show that most farm managers were fifty-five or older and only about 12 percent were under forty. The Commission’s 2025 strategy on generational renewal counts access to land among the main obstacles to entry. The Commission has responded with a planned European Observatory on Farmland and a new expert group, making land distribution an explicit policy concern.[12]

Tenancy complicates the picture further. The reporting on Brăila and the Berry concerns owners and buyers, and it gives tenants little attention. In 2020 rented land made up 46 percent of the Union’s utilized agricultural area, only two points less than land farmed by its owners. Almost two thirds of that rented land lay on farms of more than a hundred hectares.[13] Consolidation can therefore proceed through leases as easily as through purchases; a large operator can take on land without ever appearing in the register of owners. For the tenant, however, the same arrangement creates a different problem. A long tenancy leaves no trace in the title register, and whether it survives a sale depends entirely on national tenancy law. For a long-term tenant, the practical question is whether that relationship survives a change of ownership and what protection it receives when the land is sold.

Nationality helps in some cases, but it does not settle the underlying issue. A Romanian farm bought by another Romanian operator can become absentee-owned and heavily consolidated, whereas an Italian farmer who buys land in western Romania and moves there becomes part of the local economy in a way that a Bucharest investment company does not. On the broad definition of patrimony given in Section I, the Italian has acquired standing through residence and labor; the Bucharest company has acquired only title. Foreignness matters for jurisdiction and sometimes for security, but it reveals little about whether the relationship between land and community has survived. What matters more is whether control remains embedded in the productive and civic life of a place or treats the land as one asset in a larger portfolio. Those relationships are harder to measure than nationality, particularly now that agriculture often operates through companies whose effective controllers are several steps removed from the parcel.

IV. Berry, Brăila, and the corporate form

Control of farmland can change hands without a field being sold. Beginning at the end of 2014, Chinese investors acquired control of several agricultural companies in the Berry. The first transaction, which Robert Levesque later reconstructed in detail for La revue foncière, involved the SCEA de Chambrisse, a civil farming company working about a thousand hectares, in which the Hong Yang International Investment Company bought 98 percent of the shares. The previous operators kept two percent and stayed on as managers, without authority to approve any expenditure above €1,000. Further purchases on the same pattern brought more than 1,700 hectares under common control without the kind of direct sale of land that would have triggered the full powers of France’s SAFER land agencies.[14] Local reporting, much of it drawing on the departmental farmers’ union, described farmhouses left empty for most of the year and livestock sold off.10 While the episode was widely reported as Chinese “land grabbing,” the more lasting problem was institutional: a system built to supervise deeds could be bypassed once control moved into company shares.

The investment itself proved unstable when Reward Group entered bankruptcy proceedings in Beijing in 2019 after a liquidity crisis.[15] Reward Group’s failure left the underlying legal problem intact: corporate control could change or collapse while the land remained in place.

France eventually changed the law through the 2021 Sempastous legislation, which from 2023 requires prior authorization for certain changes of control in companies that own or operate agricultural land, with the stated aim of limiting excessive concentration while leaving room for farmers to establish or enlarge viable holdings.[16] The reform brought share transfers within a system that had previously focused on direct land sales. Brăila presents a similar separation between ownership and control in a different legal form. Al Dahra had no need to buy tens of thousands of Romanian parcels because the operating company already held the concession. CAP eligibility followed the agricultural operation, while title to the land remained with the state. In both Berry and Brăila, control over a large area moved through an operating company without a corresponding change in registered ownership.1

The same mechanism appears in Vectr Holdings, without a sovereign buyer. Its affiliates began farming in Romania in 2015 with 2,300 hectares, and by early 2024, after its subsidiary Vectr Farm Brăila bought the operating companies Padova Agricultura and Contara, which together held some 4,000 to 4,500 hectares of irrigated land, the group farmed roughly 27,000 hectares in the country.[17] The 2024 additions came through the purchase of operating companies, not of plots, so none of those hectares had to pass through a land sale. A land registry can identify the titled owner while leaving the farm’s operator and financing structure obscure, meaning that substantial operating control may never appear in a registry built around title.

V. What is the land for?

Consolidation is only one pressure on European soil, because the same farmland is now wanted for solar parks and housing as well as food. The green transition has increased competition for agricultural land. In Germany, investors have offered €2,500 to €4,500 per hectare a year for ground-mounted solar sites, several times the Union’s average agricultural rent of €295. The Thünen Institute has warned that the competitiveness of such installations can produce conflicts over land use.[18]

European land-use research had treated these pressures as connected long before the present disputes. Peter Verburg, Bas Eickhout, and Hans van Meijl modeled European land use at several scales at once, combining continental economic and policy drivers with local biophysical conditions, and concluded that agricultural abandonment and urbanization could reshape European landscapes even where national totals looked stable.[19] Although their scenarios concerned possible future developments, their central point was that small aggregate changes can conceal much larger regional ones. The EU has retained nearly all of its farmland even as particular countrysides have changed considerably, often at the local scale where relationships to land are formed.

In the French bocage, inherited landscape has changed without any sale of the underlying land. France’s Agriculture Ministry estimates that roughly 70 percent of the country’s hedgerow length has disappeared since 1950, with losses averaging about 23,500 kilometres a year between 2017 and 2021, driven in part by agricultural consolidation and the decline of livestock farming.[20] A hedgerow can disappear while the farm remains in the same hands, changing the inherited arrangement of the countryside as field boundaries open, parcels become easier to work with large machinery, and a feature that once had an agricultural use becomes a cost to maintain. France has since made hedgerow preservation and restoration an explicit policy objective, most visibly through the 2023 Pacte en faveur de la haie.20 Patrimonial loss can therefore occur through changes in land use even when ownership never changes.

Italy has dealt with a similar conflict through law. In 2024 Italy barred new ground-mounted photovoltaic installations on land zoned for agriculture, subject to specified exceptions. Later legislation continued to allow agrivoltaic systems whose panels are raised high enough for cultivation to continue underneath. In July 2026 the Constitutional Court rejected the challenges referred to it by the Lazio administrative court. It held that the legislature had struck a balance that was not manifestly unreasonable between the ecological transition and the protection of the agricultural landscape and its soil, both of which it treated as constitutional environmental interests. The Court then answered the argument that the ban should not reach abandoned or degraded land by holding that legal certainty required the rule to follow the land’s planning classification, since what mattered was whether a field could be farmed and not whether it was being farmed at that moment.[21] The judgment is framed in environmental terms, but its effect is to protect agricultural land for future use even when the present holder would prefer another use.

The Common Agricultural Policy creates another tension. Area-based support has long rewarded hectares, so the largest operators have received the largest payments. Part of the political case for the CAP, meanwhile, has been to sustain a dispersed farming economy. Agricost’s payments illustrate the tension.1 The Commission’s proposal for the 2028–2034 CAP would make degressivity mandatory for the new Degressive Area-Based Income Support, cap that payment at €100,000 per farm per year, and put more weight on young and smaller farmers. As of September 2026, however, the European Parliament’s rapporteur was pressing for a far higher ceiling of €500,000, with a committee vote not expected until December, so the cap remains only a proposal.[22] Scale is not inherently a problem, since a hundred-hectare grain farm and a five-hectare vineyard cannot be judged by the same standard and some crops require consolidation to remain viable. The problem is that public rules can reward acreage without regard to who controls it and then treat the shortage of new entrants as a separate issue.

VI. Ukraine and the return of strategic ground

Russia’s invasion has made physical access to Ukrainian farmland uncertain. A prewar study based on StateGeoCadastre data put the country’s land fund at 60.35 million hectares and its arable area at 32.54 million, so arable fields alone covered about 54 percent of the national territory; the OECD’s 2019 series put Ukraine’s agricultural area at 41.33 million hectares, more than a quarter of the area farmed across the whole European Union.[23] A World Bank–FAO assessment describes Ukraine’s chernozem soils, rich in organic matter and covering more than half of the country’s landmass, as the basis of exceptional agronomic conditions, though it also warns that erosion had long been degrading them.[24] Ukraine’s agricultural importance also depends on infrastructure, since its grain reaches world markets through Black Sea ports and the railways and storage networks that serve them, so productive soil alone is not enough.

Ukraine’s land reform had already treated farmland as a resource that could not simply be opened to the market without limits. The long moratorium on sales of private agricultural land ended in stages, with Ukrainian citizens allowed to buy up to one hundred hectares from July 2021 and Ukrainian-owned legal entities admitted from January 2024 under a 10,000-hectare ceiling. State and communal farmland cannot be sold at all, and whether foreigners may buy agricultural land is reserved for a national referendum.[25]

Ownership rules are only one layer of the problem, though. Research conducted before the full-scale invasion found land-management functions scattered across institutions with overlapping responsibilities. The decentralization reforms of the mid-2010s, meanwhile, had transferred important powers over communal land to local communities without always connecting them to decisions taken at the center.23 That division of authority leaves local communities bearing many of the consequences of land-use decisions without necessarily controlling the institutions that make them.

Russia’s invasion changed the issue from who could buy a field to whether the field could be farmed and passed on at all. A 2024 study of Ukrainian land law distinguishes among three things that ordinary usage often runs together: soil, the fertile layer at the surface; land, which joins that soil to the minerals and natural elements beneath it; and land resources, the wider territorial basis of settlement and economic activity.[26] By the end of 2025 the joint recovery assessment by the Ukrainian government, the World Bank, the European Commission, and the United Nations put agricultural reconstruction and recovery needs above $55 billion. By the end of July 2026 the state’s subsidized demining program had returned about 16,400 hectares of farmland to use.[27] “Returned to use” is an administrative category. The same 2024 study shows that explosions and heavy metals alter soil structure and that some demining methods disturb the humus layer, and it concludes that conservation may make more sense than cultivation on the worst-damaged ground.26 Even after clearance, damaged soil will pass to the next generation in poorer condition than it was in before 2022.

Ukraine’s subsoil is governed differently: the natural-resources agreement with Washington, in force since May 23, 2025, did not transfer Ukrainian minerals. Ukraine’s official account states that subsoil and natural resources remain under Ukrainian ownership and control, while Ukraine pays half of specified future revenues from new mineral, oil, and gas licenses into a Reconstruction Investment Fund that the two governments run jointly and seeded with $75 million each.[28] Farmland and subsoil over the same ground thus sit under different rules: foreign capital is kept from owning the first and invited to finance the second.25 Ukraine can therefore accept foreign investment in resource development while retaining ownership and the authority to decide what may be extracted and where.28

Ukraine’s eventual accession to the European Union would bring its farmland rules inside the single market. Negotiations formally began in 2024, and by September 2026 the Fundamentals and External Relations clusters had been opened; the remaining four, including the cluster covering agriculture and cohesion, were held up by Hungary.[29] A country with more than forty million hectares of agricultural land would change subsidy politics and competition across the Union once it joined the Common Agricultural Policy. Its rules on who may own farmland, and under what ceiling, would also meet Article 63 and the burden of justification described in Section II. The states that joined in 2004 and 2007 received transitional periods before their farmland rules had to conform. The Commission’s proceedings against five of them once those periods expired show what could follow if Ukraine’s negotiators do not secure similar terms.9

VII. Security and patrimony

Patrimony concerns the ordinary governance of land when control becomes detached from the communities that give a place continuity, whereas security arises more narrowly when an investor’s links to a foreign government or the strategic function of an asset could limit what a state can do in a crisis.

The EU addressed that narrower security problem in Regulation (EU) 2026/1386, adopted in June 2026 and in force since July, although most of its screening regime will not apply until January 17, 2028, when it replaces Regulation (EU) 2019/452. From that date every member state must maintain a foreign-investment screening mechanism, and authorities must consider food security, including cases where the Union target owns or operates more than 10,000 hectares of farmland, along with any links between an investor and a third-country government.[30] The regulation does not prohibit large foreign-controlled farms, but it places holdings of this scale explicitly within the Union’s food-security analysis.

Brăila, at several times the 10,000-hectare reference point, is exactly the kind of holding Article 19 names as a factor in food-security screening.30 Yet the screening inquiry covers only a small part of the land question. A 12,000-hectare holding controlled by a foreign state may trigger a security review, but a 9,000-hectare holding assembled by a domestic investment company falls below the reference point altogether, even though either could change local access to land and the distribution of subsidies in much the same way. For local land access and subsidy distribution, the effects may be similar. Screening can address an acute vulnerability, but it does not decide who should have standing in the ordinary governance of land.

Replacing foreign control with domestic conglomerates would not solve the broader problem. New entrants could remain shut out and payments concentrated in the same few hands. Nationality matters where jurisdiction and state leverage matter, but it says little about which relationships to land deserve recognition in ordinary land policy.

VIII. Land returns to policy

Much of the current change in European land policy is occurring in strategy papers, pilot projects, and expert groups that attract far less attention than a Gulf acquisition. The Commission’s strategy on generational renewal treats access to land as a structural problem. The Observatory, still a pilot project, is meant to supply data on land-market dynamics and barriers to entry. The Expert Group on Farmland met for the first time in May 2026 with a remit that includes land banks and alternative ownership structures.12 These documents do not use the word patrimony, but they address several of the same issues. Tracking who controls land and regulating transfers of company shares both require information that title and price alone do not provide. The result is a policy focus on control, use, and transfer in addition to title and price.

That requires better information about control. An observatory that records transfers of company shares and land-use rights as well as deeds would make the beneficial owner of a farming company as visible as the owner of a field. Pre-emption provides a different route because it lets an existing relationship to land enter the decision before a sale is complete. French law, through the SAFER right of pre-emption and the sitting tenant’s own right, already gives working farmers and tenants first refusal in defined cases.[31] Such a right can operate inside the single market when it pursues legitimate agricultural objectives and is applied proportionately, which is the limit the Court drew in Ospelt.7

A sequence of lawful sales can transform a district even when each transaction satisfies the law. The Sempastous regime addresses that cumulative effect by requiring authorization when a change of control would carry a holding past a threshold set by the regional prefect in relation to the regional average farm size.16 The Common Agricultural Policy can reinforce the same concentration through area-based support; capping and degressivity would reduce that effect. Security review should remain separate, with the buyer’s nationality relevant only to the narrower issues described in Section VII.

Pre-emption does impose a cost, especially on the retiring farmer who may be relying on the sale as a pension. French law already addresses that objection. A SAFER may pre-empt at the price already agreed with the buyer; when it judges that price excessive and offers less, the seller may accept, ask a court to fix the value, or withdraw the land from sale, and in November 2024 the Cour de cassation held that withdrawal remains open at any stage of the court proceedings.[32] At the agreed price the seller loses only the choice of buyer, and a lower price is one he can refuse by keeping his land. French tenancy law protects long-term tenants more directly. The sale of leased land does not end the lease, which binds the buyer; the tenant has a right to renewal; and a new owner can reclaim the land at the end of a term only to farm it himself or through close family, and only on eighteen months’ notice.[33] A long tenancy therefore carries real protection even when the land changes hands.

Even with such safeguards, giving patrimonial claims legal weight carries costs of its own. Rules that favor incumbents can narrow the pool of buyers, reduce what a retiring farmer can realize from his principal asset, and preserve holdings that no longer make economic sense. Those tradeoffs argue for limited protections rather than a general preference for incumbents. Europe cannot freeze land inside existing families without shutting out newcomers. Any system that values residence or active farming still has to make room for farmers from other countries and for people with no ancestral claim to the places where they mean to work. Nor should access depend on cultural or national belonging; the residence rules the Commission challenged in 2015 show how quickly rules meant to protect communities can become preferences for compatriots.9 Possession of capital should not be the only source of standing. Residence, active farming, long tenancy, and the prospect of succession all deserve some weight when land changes hands. Agricultural land must remain property if farmers are to borrow and retire, but it also sustains food production and settlement, uses that can pull policy in different directions.

Two decisions half a century apart made the Great Brăila Island what it is today. The dikes of the 1960s settled what the ground was for by decree, at a time when the fishermen of the Balta had no recognized means of objecting. The 2018 sale settled by contract who would direct the island. Ukraine, meanwhile, has spent the years since Russia’s invasion separating different forms of authority over land, limiting who may own farmland while negotiating foreign investment in its subsoil without transferring ownership. Europe is not going to reverse the law of property and capital; modern agriculture depends too heavily on both. Europe still has to decide how much legal weight to give residence, use, tenancy, succession, and other durable relationships to land when ownership or control changes.

Revised September 2026

Photo source: PxHere.com.

Notes:

[1] Government of the Netherlands, “Biggest Farm in Romania Taken Over by Abu Dhabi-Based Group,” Agroberichten Buitenland, August 1, 2018, https://www.agroberichtenbuitenland.nl/actueel/nieuws/2018/08/03/biggest-farm-in-romania-taken-over-by-abu-dhabi-based-group; DeSmog, “Gulf Royal Family Banks Over €70 Million in EU Farming Funds,” May 6, 2026, https://www.desmog.com/2026/05/06/gulf-royal-family-banks-over-e70-million-in-eu-farming-funds/. The first gives the concession through 2032 and the seller’s €200–250 million valuation; the second reports 57,000 hectares and more than €71 million in CAP payments to Al Nahyan- and ADQ-linked companies, including €10.5 million to Agricost in 2024.

[2] Florentin Coman, “Cât de mare este Insula Mare a Brăilei? Secretele pământului dintre ape,” Adevărul, February 17, 2015, https://adevarul.ro/stiri-locale/braila/cat-de-mare-este-insula-mare-a-brailei-secretele-1601143.html; Florentin Coman, “Cum s-a distrus Balta Brăilei în goana comuniștilor după teren arabil,” Adevărul, October 10, 2016, https://adevarul.ro/stiri-locale/braila/cum-s-a-distrus-balta-brailei-in-goana-1740657.html; G4Media, “Consiliul Concurenței confirmă autorizarea cumpărării de către o firmă din Emiratele Arabe Unite a companiei care a concesionat Insula Mare a Brăilei,” July 2018, https://www.g4media.ro/consiliul-concurentei-confirma-autorizarea-cumpararii-de-catre-o-firma-din-emiratele-arabe-unite-a-companiei-care-a-concesionat-insula-mare-a-brailei-au-fost-notificate-si-alte-autoritati-cu.html. On post-1989 restitution and fragmentation, see Romania, Law No. 18/1991 on the Land Fund, and Eurostat, “Farms and Farmland in the European Union – Statistics,” 2020 census data.

[3] Eurostat, “Farms and Farmland in the European Union – Statistics,” Statistics Explained, data extracted April 2026, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Farms_and_farmland_in_the_European_Union_-_statistics; EU CAP Network, “A Sector in Transition: Latest Data on Farms and Farmland in the EU,” June 18, 2026, https://eu-cap-network.ec.europa.eu/news/sector-transition-latest-data-farms-and-farmland-eu_en.

[4] Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina, trans. Lovett F. Edwards (1959; repr., Phoenix, 1977), 40. The discussion of the kapia and the town’s life around the bridge draws on the opening chapters.

[5] Consolidated Version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, art. 63(1), Official Journal of the European Union C 202, June 7, 2016.

[6] European Commission, “Commission Interpretative Communication on the Acquisition of Farmland and European Union Law,” Official Journal of the European Union C 350 (2017/C 350/05), https://ec.europa.eu/finance/docs/law/171012-communication-acquisition-of-farmland_en.pdf.

[7] Margarethe Ospelt and Schlössle Weissenberg Familienstiftung, Case C-452/01, judgment of September 23, 2003; Court of Justice, press release no. 77/03, September 23, 2003, https://curia.europa.eu/en/actu/communiques/cp03/aff/cp0377en.htm.

[8] SEGRO Kft. and Günther Horváth, Joined Cases C-52/16 and C-113/16, judgment of March 6, 2018, EU:C:2018:157; Court of Justice, press release no. 25/18, March 6, 2018, https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/p1_862679/hu; Commission v Hungary (Usufruct over Agricultural Land), Case C-235/17, judgment of May 21, 2019, EU:C:2019:432.

[9] On the 2015–2016 infringement proceedings over farmland-acquisition rules in Bulgaria, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Slovakia, see Jenny Hopkinson, “Commission Pushes Eastern States to Ease Farmland Ownership Rules,” Politico Europe, May 26, 2016, reprinted by farmlandgrab.org, https://farmlandgrab.org/post/26170; FarmingUK, “EU Threatens Six Member States with Legal Action Due to Possible Violation of Free Agri-Capital Movement,” May 2016, https://www.farminguk.com/news/eu-threatens-six-member-states-with-legal-action-due-to-possible-violation-of-free-agri-capital-movement_41898.html; Radio Slovakia International, “Slovakia Criticised for Farmland Acquisition Law,” May 2016, https://enrsi.stvr.sk/articles/news/107878/slovakia-criticised-for-farmland-acquisition-law.

[10] John Laurenson, “Chinese Investors Are Buying Up French Farmland,” Marketplace, September 19, 2016, reprinted by farmlandgrab.org, https://farmlandgrab.org/post/26515-chinese-investors-are-buying-up-french-farmland/print; consoGlobe, “Accaparement des terres : la Chine achète aussi en France,” n.d., https://www.consoglobe.com/accaparement-terres-chinois-france-cg. The price, retirement, empty-farmhouse, and livestock claims are attributed to the FDSEA de l’Indre.

[11] Eurostat, “EU Agricultural Land Price Increased by 6.1% in 2024,” January 28, 2026, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20260128-2.

[12] European Parliament, Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, “Generational Renewal in the EU Farms of the Future,” 2022/2182(INI), Legislative Observatory, https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/document-summary?id=1760129; European Commission, COM(2025) 872 final, March 2026, https://www.eesc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2026-07/agri_nat_963_march_2026_final.docx; European Commission, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, “Access to Land,” https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/vision-overview/generational-renewal/access-land_en.

[13] Eurostat, “Farm Tenure – Statistics Explained,” Agricultural Census 2020, data published April 2024, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cache/128127.pdf.

[14] Robert Levesque, “Les acquisitions chinoises dans le Berry. Un cas européen,” La revue foncière, no. 11 (May–June 2016), translated as “Farming Land. Chinese Purchases in the Berry. A European Case,” AGTER, https://agter.org/bdf/en/corpus_chemin/fiche-chemin-704.html; consoGlobe, “Accaparement des terres : la Chine achète aussi en France,” n.d., https://www.consoglobe.com/accaparement-terres-chinois-france-cg.

[15] AFP, “Reward Goes Bankrupt as CEO’s Baguette Plans Die,” Taipei Times, June 27, 2019, https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2019/06/27/2003717643, reporting that Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court accepted Reward Group’s application to enter receivership in May 2019 after liquidity problems and missed debt payments.

[16] France, Law No. 2021-1756 of December 23, 2021, portant mesures d’urgence pour assurer la régulation de l’accès au foncier agricole au travers de structures sociétaires, arts. L. 333-2 and L. 333-3 of the Code rural et de la pêche maritime; Decree No. 2022-1515 of December 2, 2022. See also “Régulation foncière : la loi Sempastous entre en vigueur le 1er janvier 2023,” Réussir Grandes Cultures, https://www.reussir.fr/grandes-cultures/regulation-fonciere-la-loi-sempastous-entre-en-vigueur-le-1er-janvier-2023.

[17] Irina Marica, “Vectr Holdings Reaches 27,000 Hectares of Agricultural Land in Romania Following New Acquisitions,” Romania Insider, January 17, 2024, https://romania-insider.com/vectr-holdings-agriculture-acquisitions-romania-2024; “Vectr Holdings achiziționează Padova Agricultura și Contara,” Revista Biz, January 17, 2024, https://www.revistabiz.ro/vectr-holdings-achizitioneaza-padova-agricultura-si-contara-2/; Irina Marica, “Vectr Realty Acquires The Landmark Offices in Bucharest,” Romania Insider, July 11, 2024, https://www.romania-insider.com/vectr-realty-the-landmark-offices-deal-bucharest-2024. Contemporary reports give 4,000 to 4,500 hectares for the Padova–Contara acquisitions.

[18] Jonas Böhm and Thomas de Witte, Solarstrom vom Feld: Eine effiziente Nutzung der Fläche mit geringen Flächennutzungskonflikten, Thünen Project Brief 2025/24 (Braunschweig: Thünen-Institut für Betriebswirtschaft, 2025), https://www.thuenen.de/media/publikationen/project_brief/Project_brief_2025_24.pdf; “Pachtverträge für Freiflächenphotovoltaik – darauf achten!,” interview with Mandus Fahje, top agrar, n.d., https://www.topagrar.com/energie/news/pachtvertraege-fuer-freiflaechenphotovoltaik-darauf-achten-13213539.html; Eurostat, note 11. The €2,500–4,500 lease range is a German trade-press figure, not an EU-wide average.

[19] Peter H. Verburg, Bas Eickhout, and Hans van Meijl, “A Multi-Scale, Multi-Model Approach for Analyzing the Future Dynamics of European Land Use,” The Annals of Regional Science 42 (2008): 57–77, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00168-007-0136-4.

[20] French Ministry of Agriculture, “La haie, levier de la planification écologique,” May 23, 2023, https://agriculture.gouv.fr/la-haie-levier-de-la-planification-ecologique, reporting that 70 percent of French hedgerow length had disappeared since 1950 and estimating losses of 23,500 km a year in 2017–2021, driven by agricultural land consolidation and the decline of livestock farming; French Ministry of Agriculture, “Présentation du ‘Pacte en faveur de la haie’ doté d’un budget de 110 M€ dès 2024,” September 29, 2023, https://agriculture.gouv.fr/presentation-du-pacte-en-faveur-de-la-haie-dote-dun-budget-de-110-meu-des-2024.

[21] Corte costituzionale, judgment no. 127/2026, July 16, 2026, https://giurcost.org/decisioni/2026/0127s-26.html; Corte costituzionale, Ufficio comunicazione e stampa, press release, July 16, 2026, https://www.cortecostituzionale.it/uploads/release/6a58b01c4c330.pdf.

[22] European Commission, “The CAP 2028–2034 Proposal Explained: Fairer, Better Targeted Income Support for Farmers,” November 10, 2025, https://agriculture.ec.europa.eu/media/news/cap-2028-2034-proposal-explained-fairer-better-targeted-income-support-farmers-2025-11-10_en; European Parliament, “Common Agricultural Policy 2028–2034,” Legislative Train Schedule, https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/spotlight-MFF/file-common-agricultural-policy-2028-2034; “Differences in European Parliament over Capping of 2028–2034 Aid,” Agence Europe, September 3, 2026, https://agenceurope.eu/en/bulletin/article/13929/8/differences-in-european-parliament-over-capping-of-2028-2034-aid.

[23] Nataliia Tretiak et al., “Land Resources and Land Use Management in Ukraine: Problems of Agreement of the Institutional Structure, Functions and Authorities,” European Research Studies Journal 24, no. 1 (2021): 776–789, https://ersj.eu/journal/1994, for the 60.35 million-hectare land fund and 32.54 million hectares of arable land; OECD, Agricultural Policy Monitoring and Evaluation 2021, Table 27.3, “Ukraine: Contextual Indicators,” https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/agricultural-policy-monitoring-and-evaluation-2021_2d810e01-en/full-report/component-32.html, giving 41.329 million hectares of agricultural area in 2019; Eurostat, “Agriculture Statistics – Family Farming in the EU,” Statistics Explained, 2026, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Agriculture_statistics_-_family_farming_in_the_EU.

[24] FAO Investment Centre and World Bank, Ukraine: Soil Fertility to Strengthen Climate Resilience (FAO, 2014), https://openknowledge.fao.org/handle/20.500.14283/i3905e; World Bank, “Ukraine: Soil Fertility to Strengthen Climate Resilience,” December 5, 2014, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2014/12/05/ukraine-soil.

[25] Ukraine, Law No. 552-IX of March 31, 2020, on the circulation of agricultural land; President of Ukraine, “President Signed the Law on the Circulation of Agricultural Land,” April 28, 2020, https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/prezident-pidpisav-zakon-shodo-obigu-zemel-silskogospodarsko-60901. Law No. 4502-IX on citizenship, in force from January 16, 2026, does not alter these land-ownership rules.

[26] Liudmyla Datsenko, Svitlana Titova, Marharyta Dubnytska, and Oksana Kustovska, “The Issue of Sustainable Land Use in Ukraine Taking into Account the Consequences of the War,” Acta Scientiarum Polonorum Formatio Circumiectus 23, no. 2 (2024): 25–38, https://acta.urk.edu.pl/The-issue-of-sustainable-land-use-in-Ukraine-taking-into-account-the-consequences,185974,0,1.html.

[27] Government of Ukraine, World Bank Group, European Commission, and United Nations, Ukraine: Fifth Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA5), February 2022–December 2025, February 23, 2026, https://www.undp.org/ukraine/publications/ukraine-fifth-rapid-damage-and-needs-assessment-rdna5-february-2022-december-2025; Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, “Ministry of Economy and Environment: Results of Humanitarian Demining in July,” August 5, 2026, https://www.kmu.gov.ua/en/news/minekonomiky-pidsumky-humanitarnoho-rozminuvannia-za-lypen.

[28] U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Treasury Announces Agreement to Establish United States-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund,” April 30, 2025, reposted by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, https://www.dfc.gov/media/press-releases/treasury-announces-agreement-establish-united-states-ukraine-reconstruction; UNN, “Investment Agreement between Ukraine and the USA: Svyrydenko Spoke about the Main Provisions of the Document,” April 30, 2025, https://unn.ua/en/news/investment-agreement-between-ukraine-and-the-usa-svyrydenko-spoke-about-the-main-provisions-of-the-document; Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, “U.S.-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund Poised for First Investments in 2026,” December 19, 2025, https://www.kmu.gov.ua/en/news/amerykansko-ukrainskyi-investytsiinyi-fond-vidbudovy-hotovyi-do-pershykh-investytsiinykh-proiektiv-u-2026-rotsi.

[29] Council of the European Union, “EU and Ukraine Open First Accession Negotiations Cluster,” June 15, 2026, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/06/15/eu-and-ukraine-open-first-accession-negotiations-cluster/; Council of the European Union, “Enlargement: EU Opens Accession Negotiations with Ukraine on External Relations Policies,” July 14, 2026, https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2026/07/14/enlargement-eu-opens-accession-negotiations-with-ukraine-on-external-relations-policies/; Ukrainska Pravda, “Hungary Again Blocks Opening of Clusters 2 and 3 for Ukraine,” September 1, 2026, https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/09/01/8051374/; Razom UA, “EU Opens Sixth Negotiation Cluster with Ukraine — But Postpones Four Others until Autumn,” July 14, 2026, https://razomua.media/en/news/politika/yes-vidkryv-shostyy-perehovornyy-klaster-z-ukrayinoyu-ale-chotyry-inshi-vidklav-do-oseni.

[30] Regulation (EU) 2026/1386 of the European Parliament and of the Council of June 17, 2026, on the screening of foreign investments in the Union and repealing Regulation (EU) 2019/452, Official Journal of the European Union, June 26, 2026, arts. 3, 19, 30, 31.

[31] Code rural et de la pêche maritime, arts. L. 143-1 et seq. (SAFER pre-emption) and L. 412-1 (sitting tenant’s pre-emption); Alexis Gaucher-Piola, “Le droit de préemption du preneur ‘en place,’” Eurojuris, March 1, 2006, https://www.eurojuris.fr/marketing-et-ventes/articles/droit-preemption-preneur-place-6289.htm.

[32] Code rural et de la pêche maritime, arts. L. 143-10 and R. 143-12; Bignon Lebray, “Extension de la possibilité pour le vendeur d’un bien agricole de renoncer à la vente dans le cadre d’une procédure de préemption par la SAFER avec une révision de prix,” https://www.bignonlebray.com/actualites/publications/droit-rural-extension-droit-renonciation-vendeur-procedures-de-preemption-de-la-safer-en-cas-de-revision-prix.html; Cour de cassation, November 28, 2024, no. 23-18.746.

[33] Code civil, art. 1743; Code rural et de la pêche maritime, arts. L. 411-46 and L. 411-58 to L. 411-63; Reda Kohen, “Terre louée vendue : le bail rural continue, quand le nouvel acquéreur peut donner congé et comment le preneur se défend,” Kohen Avocats, September 10, 2026, https://kohenavocats.fr/2026/09/10/vente-terre-louee-bail-rural-conge-acquereur-contestation-preneur/.