British Farmers Invade Eastern Bloc
EASTERN EUROPE. "The quality of the environment in our
cities is quite poor due to industrial pollution, but the quality of
our countryside is high, and wildlife is plentiful," BirdLife Hungary
conservationist Szabolcs Nagy told the Chronicle Foreign
Service. That could change as an invasion of speculators from
Britain, Holland, Germany, Scandinavia and Australia are
snapping up farmland in Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic at fire- sale prices ($6.50 to $52 an acre). "If left to the
free market, there is a real danger that the wildlife of the region
will be damaged," warns Hannah Bartram, with the UK’s Royal
Society for the Protection of Birds. British farmers pushed the
great bustard to extinction in England and has reduced Britain’s
once-widespread corncrakes into a small pocket of survivors in
Scotland. In 1997, a British farming consortium bought 13,000
acres of unspoiled grassland in Hungary – a critical bird habitat
where the threatened great bustard still survives – and
immediately plowed up 2,600 acres. "If former Eastern bloc
countries are to avoid repeating the mistakes made by Western
countries,"” Bartram stated, "positive steps need to be taken to
promote low-intensity and low-pesticide farming."
© Earth Island Journal, Fall 1998
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