When the Iron Curtain fell 20 years ago, Mr Everdingen did not have to think twice. In his native Netherlands he reared organic livestock and wanted to expand his business, a difficult task in a densely populated country. He toured some former communist countries and in the end settled in western Bohemia, where he bought a farm that none of the locals wanted.
Today his cows graze the meadows around Žebráky near Tachov and the farmer offers popular agrotourism services. “We’ve simply found fantastic conditions for our business,” says Mr Everdingen, who has by now learned decent Czech. His farm has made the surrounding landscape more picturesque, and locals regard this foreigner on Czech soil as one of their own.
Mr Everdingen part-owns and part-rents his land. “Ownership is safer, though,” he says. “It gives you more of a guarantee that your investment in the land will return.” The Dutch farmer’s chance will come in 2011, when a temporary ban on foreigners buying Czech farmland will be lifted. Meanwhile, Czechs wonder how the move will change the country’s rural landscape.
Prices will grow
Landownership by foreigners is no rarity in Europe. Abandoned estates in rural Normandy have been recently popular among wealthy Britons, who buy them up en masse and try their luck as farmers. How much demand there will be for Czech farmland is now hard to estimate. There exist no official statistics on the number of foreigners farming in the Czech Republic – whether they rent the land or own it through proxies. Experts estimate that foreigners now cultivate between 1% and 10% of the country’s 3 million hectares of farmland.
What makes land purchases in the Czech Republic still more complex is the obscured ownership of some properties. A landownership programme currently under way should clarify the situation and facilitate purchases in the future. In any case, foreigners already show considerable interest in Czech land, which is the cheapest in Europe. While in the Netherlands a hectare of land costs EUR 36,000 on average, in the Czech Republic it is only EUR 2,520. This huge gap is a source of fears that, once the ban on farmland ownership by foreigners has been lifted in 2011, wealthy entrepreneurs from all around Europe will buy up Czech plots en mass.
Still, some experts say such fears are ungrounded. “The interest will be higher, but not overwhelming,” agriculture expert Petr Havel says. “Besides, foreigners may help revitalise Czech agriculture with their know-how.” Jaroslav Šebek, of an association of Czech private farmers, says that Dutch and Italians are showing the most interest in land here. Some foreign agriculturalists who have settled on Czech soil are already seeking membership in Šebek’s association. “The only problem is the language barrier, but even that will hopefully be soon removed,” Šebek says.
Combine foreigners’ plans to buy Czech farmland with the desire of domestic biofuel producers to supply their endeavours with energy crops grown on their own fields, and the conclusion is obvious: Selling land now would be foolish. “The price will definitely go up,” Havel says. The only question is who will benefit – whether it will be the country’s 3.5 million small-property owners, or large agricultural corporations, which are already buying up cheap land both from individuals and from the state. The answer to this question will also determine what the future Czech rural landscape will look like.
“I own one hectare near Čáslav,” says Tomáš Doucha, a researcher from the Institute of Agricultural Economics and Information. A biofuel producer recently offered to pay CZK 100,000 for his lot and to take care of all the paperwork associated with the transaction. Dozens of small-property owners in the area got the same letter as Mr Doucha. It all makes sense. The biofuel company wants to grow its own energy crops, while owners who gained their land in restitution and may have never set foot on it will be tempted by the prospects of effortless profit. “I didn’t sell my hectare,” Doucha says, laughing. “I’m holding on to it for scientific reasons: so I can watch the development of land prices. But all my neighbours have sold.” The buyer has thus acquired dozens of hectares of cheap land.
As a result of the communist-era collective farming, many of today’s small-property owners do not even know where their regained plots lie. A mass robbery of private farmland in the 1950s and its forced collectivisation under cooperative agriculture make it difficult today to keep track of what used to be whose. The descendants of former private farmers have regained land in restitutions, but their property may easily lie in the middle of a vast cooperative field without any access road. According to the Czech Association of Landowners, more than a half of small-property owners do not live anywhere near their plots. “No wonder they accept any mildly interesting offer,” association chairman František Janda says.
Measure and divide
Most land purchases have so far been made by large farming corporations, which can use their free cash to buy from many owners simultaneously and without a need to find out where exactly this or that lot lies. (Laws also give large companies priority in purchases of cheap land from the state.) Not only are small landowners losing their chance to maximise their profit by selling later, but also the country as a whole is moving away from the desired model of a varied and hence aesthetically pleasing rural landscape cultivated by individual farmers. Rather, it now looks like the Czech countryside will again feature vast and monotonous fields planted with whichever crop will yield most revenue at the moment (currently this is the case of the yellow, smelly rape).
“The situation is far from rosy, but I don’t think it’s that dramatic,” the farmer Šebek says. To explain his optimism, he quotes the abovementioned programme that allows landowners to use public funds to precisely measure their lots, separate them from other properties and to build access roads. It is a complex and time-consuming task, but in the end the owner will be in a better position, knowing where and how big his or her property is. This has already been done for 10% of all land, and the properties’ boundaries are now clearly recorded in cadastre maps. Other owners are expected to follow suit.
“This will help small farmers to buy new land piece by piece,” Šebek says. His association also relies on an EU plan to overhaul the system of farming subsidies so that individuals would get more support. Today, 80% of agricultural subsidies across the EU go to only 20% of the largest corporations. Mariann Boel, the EU commissioner for agriculture and rural development, instead wants to give most of this money to small farmers, who serve society by maintaining the landscape. But the proposed reform has so far met fierce opposition, including from Petr Gandalovič, until recently the Czech agriculture minister, who broke his earlier pledge to support the move and instead voted against it along with his British, German, Irish, Polish and Slovak colleagues.
