The Romanians are a Latin people who have tenaciously retained their language and customs despite being surrounded by Hungarians and Slav speaking Bulgars, Yugoslavs and Ukrainians. In turn they fought against Hungarian, Turkish and Hapsburg occupation. Heroic leaders resisted Turkish onslaughts for five centuries. Romania became an independent state in 1878, fought against Germany in the First World War and with Germany in the second. Though it joined the Allies in 1944 its port war fate was decided by the Soviet advance into central Europe: it became a Communist state. On the map Romania resembles a Catherine wheel. In the south-east, the “fuse” comprises the reed jungle, river channels and wildlife paradise of the DANUBE delta, and the dry rolling farmlands of DOBRUJA separating the river from the black sea coast. Inland is a ring of rich agricultural plains, flat in the south and west and hilly in the east.
The country faces growing economic problems after a period of spectacular growth. Rising overseas debt has led to import restrictions, reducing Romania’s debt to the west but causing serious shortages of food and consumer goods. Sugar, flour and cooking oil are rationed: there are power shortages and queues for meat and petrol. One major set back in the drying up of the Ploiesti oil fields, the country’s most valuable resource, having developed petrochemical and related industries in the 1960s, Romania must now import more oil each year. For more than two decades Romania pushed through five year development plans concentration on investment in heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods, from 1960 to 1970 it has the world’s third fastest growing industrial production; from 1970 to 1976 the third fastens growth in agricultural output. The state owns virtually everything except peasant farmland and housing.
The largest estates became state agricultural enterprise and peasant holding was forcibly grouped into cooperatives. A substantial tractor and farm machinery industry was developed, and mechanisation combined with larger farms and lack of incentives resulted in a dramatic fall in the number of people employed in agriculture. Between 1950 and 1984 the proportion of the total labour force engages in farming fell from 75per cent to 30 per cent. Horse-drawn carts lit by flickering oil lamps used to jingle through the dusk at harvest time, carrying farm workers home by the dozen. Today there are processions of huge, single drivers combine harvesters, with headlamps ablaze.
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