Increasing foreign interest in Romania's agricultural lands recently got international media attention with French newspaper Le Monde publishing a piece about foreign buyers of Romanian agricultural land.

The high prices for the agricultural land and the bureaucracy in Western Europe are cited among the reasons foreigners choose to buy land in Romania.

Maxime Laurent, a French Agriculture graduate decided to try his luck in agriculture in Romania, according to Le Monde. He bought some land in Macesu de Sus, in Dolj county, 10 kilometers away from the Danube. His parents didn’t manage to buy more land in France because of the obstacles imposed by the French authorities, so he decided to try Romania, according to Le Monde.

The journalists from “Le Monde” are saying that this should not come as a surprise, as Romania's agricultural land is a sort of El Dorado for farmers from Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy or Denmark.

The Laurent family invested in agriculture at Macesu de Sus because the field was near the Danube. In Dolj, the Laurent family produces wheat, barley, sunflower and rapeseed. Le Monde highlights that prices for agricultural land in Romania are around EUR 2,000/ha, much less than in Western Europe.

Foreign investors have managed to buy 700,000 ha of agricultural land in Romania – or some 8.3 percent of the country's total of arable area.

Ioana Toader, ioana.toader@romania-insider.com