The EU is forcing the conversion of agricultural land into solar and wind farms, jeopardising Romania’s food security, claims a well-known conservative publication with a sovereignist and anti-European stance.
NEWS: A confidential memo that found its way onto the agenda of the last cabinet meeting – and which was made public alongside other draft legislation – reveals an alarming issue. The European Commission has asked Romania to grant a concession for renewable energy covering no fewer than 32,000 hectares of land owned by the State Domains Agency. The Ministry of Agriculture, which oversees the State Domains Agency, must now carry out this order, but the issue is deeply troubling. The State Domains Agency has only 5,000 hectares of available degraded land, to which must be added around 10,000 hectares of arable land suitable for farming.
NARRATIVE: The European Union is seeking to starve the Romanian population in the name of the transition to renewable energy.
PURPOSE: To promote a sovereignist, anti-European and anti-establishment narrative; to validate its own conspiracy theories; and to provoke anti-government protests and social movements.
The EU is not forcing Romania to give up agricultural land in order to install solar panels and wind turbines on it
WHY THE NARRATIVE IS FALSE: The headline “GOODBYE, FOOD!” employs several classic disinformation techniques. Firstly, it extrapolates a real fact – the existence of targets for the development of renewable energy – into a conclusion that is not supported by official documents. Secondly, it attributes decisions to the European Commission that, in reality, are the responsibility of the Romanian authorities. Thirdly, it causes panic by suggesting an absolute conflict between food production and energy production, even though European policies aim to develop both energy security and food security simultaneously. This narrative is part of a broader pattern of disinformation that portrays European climate policies as a deliberate attack on agriculture and farmers, without providing the legislative and economic context in which they were adopted.
No European legislation and no decision by the European Commission obliges Romania to give up productive agricultural land for the development of renewable energy. Articles promoting this narrative start from a factual basis – Romania’s obligation to designate areas to accelerate investment in renewable energy – but present it in a misleading way, omitting the context and attributing powers to the European Commission that it does not possess. In reality, the European Union sets targets for reducing emissions and increasing energy production from renewable sources, but it does not decide which land in Romania should be converted into solar or wind farms. The choice of sites lies with the Romanian authorities and must comply with legislation on environmental protection, land-use planning and land tenure.
Renewable energy facilities will be built mainly on unproductive land
Following the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, more recently, the war in Iran, the European Union has adopted the REPowerEU initiative and amended the Renewable Energy Directive to accelerate the development of clean energy projects. The measures include the identification of ‘renewables acceleration areas’, where authorisation procedures can be streamlined following strategic environmental assessments. The aim of these areas is to reduce red tape and shorten the time needed to build new energy capacity, not to replace agriculture with solar panels. It is the Member States that identify these areas, based on their own geographical, economic and environmental conditions. The European Commission does not determine the locations and cannot compel a Member State to use specific agricultural land.
Alarmist reports claim that Romania would need to set aside approximately 32,000 hectares for the development of renewable energy, presenting this figure without the necessary explanations. In fact, this area refers to the identification of zones designated to accelerate investment and does not mean that the entire area will be covered by solar panels or wind turbines. More importantly, official documents and statements by the Romanian authorities show that the priority is to use degraded, unproductive land, former industrial sites or other state-owned land, precisely to limit the impact on valuable agricultural land.
Romania already permits, under national legislation, the development of renewable energy projects on certain agricultural land outside built-up areas, subject to strictly regulated conditions. These provisions were adopted by the Romanian Parliament and Government and do not constitute an obligation imposed directly by the European Commission. Furthermore, the legislation sets out limits on land area, authorisation procedures and conditions regarding changes to land use classification. There is no general obligation to convert productive agricultural land into land used for energy production.
Renewable energy and agriculture are not incompatible
The narrative that the development of renewable energy automatically leads to a reduction in food production ignores the way in which these projects are implemented across Europe. In most Member States, investment is directed towards rooftops, degraded land, former industrial sites, car parks, existing infrastructure or land with low agricultural productivity. At the same time, the concept of ‘agrivoltaics’ has developed in recent years, allowing the same area to be used for both agricultural production and electricity generation, by installing photovoltaic panels or wind turbines in such a way that farming activities can continue. Wind turbines occupy just 1 per cent of the area of a wind farm, with the rest of the land remaining available for use. In Denmark, for example, many turbines are installed on agricultural land without affecting farmers’ activities. Consequently, the claim that renewable energy inevitably means giving up agriculture is not supported by the experience of European countries, nor by European Union policies.
Green energy is criticised for threatening the interests of hydrocarbon producers
CONTEXT: Renewable energy threatens the dominance of the fossil fuel industry, and for this reason has become the target of numerous pieces of disinformation, which claim that wind turbines, like photovoltaic solar panels, are inefficient and harmful to the environment. Theories regarding the huge economic losses they cause or the potential danger they pose to animals and plants are circulating in the public sphere, wilfully ignoring the fact that, whilst there is indeed an impact, it is far smaller than that caused by pollution or road traffic. In fact, all these theories conceal direct economic interests on the part of the fossil fuel industry; major companies in the coal, oil and natural gas sectors have a clear interest in maintaining dependence on traditional energy sources.
In addition, there are local interests at stake, such as areas that are economically dependent on coal or gas mining; the closure of these operations would lead to high unemployment, the loss of sources of income and a marked regional economic decline. Furthermore, the ‘battle’ against green energy may conceal purely electoral interests, with the issue being used to create a conflict between ‘ordinary people’ who pay their bills and the ‘elites’ who reap the benefits. In Romania, criticism of wind energy production is used by the sovereignist opposition as a symbol of their refusal to implement the European Union’s ‘totalitarian policies’ on climate regulations, carbon taxes, etc. In this sense, energy loses its economic value and becomes a conservative ideological tool, linked not necessarily to money, but to a preference for the existing socio-political status quo.
Energy is a means of projecting power on a global scale, and major oil and natural gas-exporting nations see their positions of strength under threat as the production of green energy increases. Russia, for example, could rapidly lose not only its export revenues but also its political influence over countries that are energy-dependent on Moscow’s whims. In this regard, a few months after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin mocked the European Union for its attempts to reduce its dependence on Russian fossil fuels through the transition to green energy. “They are great experts in the field of unconventional relations, and in the energy sector, they have decided to rely on unconventional forms of energy as well – the sun and the wind. [...] It would be funny if it weren’t so sad,” the Kremlin leader remarked sarcastically.
However, it is not only Russia that is seeking to manipulate public perception of green energy; the US is doing so too, following Donald Trump’s re-election as president. Primarily concerned with the situation of the major American oil companies, during his second term Trump decided to cancel several clean energy projects, urged oil and gas companies to ‘drill, drill, drill’, sacked hundreds of environmental scientists and ordered the deletion of their research, going so far as to ban references to ‘climate change’ and ‘carbon emissions’ within the US government. Furthermore, Trump withdrew (again!) the US from the Paris Climate Agreement, while also targeting other countries’ climate policies, suggesting, for example, that the UK should tear down its ‘ugly’ wind turbines in favour of more oil drilling, and pressuring the European Union to buy more American oil and gas and abandon its climate regulations. Currently, the United States is the world’s second-largest polluter, after China, and continues to lag behind in its efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
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