From what I know the agriculture in Romania isn't supported too much. People who practice it and live by doing agriculture are mostly old people, peasants. Most of them can't even read and write properly. Ever since we joined EU, Romania had the opportunity to access a few funds for Agriculture, but the problem is that the people who would benefit from it, as I said earlier can barely read and write and the amount of paperwork that is necessary to access one of those funds is overwhelming.
My grandmother is originally from a very small village called Campulung la Tisa, wich is by the river Tisa that serves as a natural border between Romania and Ukraine. It is a mix of cultures, Hungarians, Romanians and Roma. People there live from agriculture, from what they harvest year by year. Most of them are between 60 and 80 years old and all they have is a few tractors and beside those they work with hand tools or tools they attach to horses. The village is so small but you can see the people being as busy as bees. I remember back when I was little, I used to spend weeks or even month in Campulung. My grand-grandmother woke me up at 5 AM and we used to go and "hit the fields". We walked around 2 km by foot to get to our land. We had to go in the morning because during day, in the summer, it was too hot outside, the Sun was burning and you could even feel the way it pierced your skin and even so sometimes I remember seeing her working all day. She used to sing, and talk to the plants, looking at them proudly as they grew.
At noon we used to sit under the shade of what we call "macese" (en. trans. rosehip) and eat, there was a small river next to us and it used to be so lively with birds singing and insects looking for a place to hide from the Sun. At around 7 pm we got home but I can never think of my grand-grandmother as ever being tired, the days when it rained she baked bread, outside in an oven made out of soil, I will never forget the taste of that bread along with the fresh milk.
After she died, at the age of 99, I never really went back there that often. A few weeks ago I was passing through the village and it remained almost unchanged, the same old people sitting on the side of the road on their wooden benches in front of their homes waiting for the spring to come, so they would go back to their fields and work. What will happen to them if they get ill, or too old to continue working for their own bread? Where's their food security? There's none, all they have is faith that they will get better.
Noone cares about agriculture nowadays around here. It hurts to see how we got to disgrace our land with trash, with ignorance, and even the few who try to make a difference and a change are ignored. Our only hope so far is that even those old peasants keep living and maybe we will wake up and realise that we can make a change and make this a better place for everyone not only for ourselves.
You need to be a member of Urgent Evoke to add comments!
Join Urgent Evoke