Just weeks after witnessing thousands of people in Croatia protesting against an invasion of giant chicken farms in their towns, I found myself packing my bags again. The Big Ag corporate interests planning to quadruple Croatia’s poultry production haven’t given up, and now have their eyes on another pristine corner of Croatia.
This time, I traveled to Croatia’s northeast, right on the border with Hungary, where a fiercely dedicated community is fighting to keep a megafarm from destroying an area widely known as the ‘Amazon of Europe’.
Grassroots resistance against the Chicken King
My journey started with a bus drive down from Budapest to the border, where the Drava River divides Hungary and Croatia. This region, right where the rivers Drava and Mura meet, is the stunning Mura-Drava-Danube UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Covering 930,000 hectares along 700 kilometres of rivers, this is a biodiversity hotspot with rare habitats such as floodplain forests, gravel and sand banks, river islands and oxbow lakes. It’s an ornithological haven packed with rare bird species including black storks, marsh harriers and the highest density of breeding pairs of white-tailed eagles in continental Europe.
But Big Ag MHP Group, Europe’s biggest poultry player, led by the infamous billionaire ‘Chicken King’ Yuriy Kosiuk wants to turn this paradise into an industrial zone.
The Legrad-Donja Dubrava Citizens’ Initiative, a grassroots group leading the opposition to the farm, warns that this facility will house a staggering 1.8 million chickens annually. The 50,000m2 facility will pump 30 million liters of groundwater annually from its own wells for technology and cooling, while producing 1 million litres of wastewater per year.
I was invited here by Korina and Emil, a local couple who are spearheading the grassroots resistance. They are not your typical activists; rather they are ordinary people who are taking action to defend the place they live. Emil took me on a tour to see exactly what we are up against. First, he showed me an existing megafarm linked to Perutnina Ptuj–Pipo, the same company behind the new project, which is already operating nearby. We then visited the site of the proposed expansion.
Locals told me the company is rushing to open its doors as early as next month. The threat is immediate, but this community isn’t backing down.
The protestival on the riverbank against corporate greed
The community is incredibly creative with their protest tactics. A few weeks before I arrived, they had already made waves with “kayaktivism,” with around 60 activists launching onto the river to take striking photos that exposed how dangerously close the facility is to the water. They traded paddles for microphones and organised a “Protestival” right on the riverbank, attended by hundreds of people and representatives from various organisations, musicians and local grassroots groups.
The energy was electric. Traditional Croatian folk musicians shared the stage with rock legend Darko Rundek, all standing united against corporate greed.
All waters are connected, different communities threatened by the same Big Ag playbook
Back in my hometown of Budapest, the Danube river is my favorite part of the city. And water doesn’t care about borders. The Danube River, which flows through Hungary and forms part of the border between Croatia and Serbia, joins the Drava, flowing into the sea and the global oceans. So what happens here matters.
The people of northern Croatia’s struggle against the Veliki Pažut industrial poultry farm is a real David and Goliath fight – a small community standing up to international corporations to defend an area they love. But sadly, it is the experience of many communities world over.
- In Spain, communities are organising against the construction of a new factory farm cramming one million hens and producing over 235 million eggs a year.
- In Mexico, the iconic cenotes of the Maya rainforest are being polluted by illegal pig farms, threatening the water supply for indigenous communities across the region.
- In Nigeria, the world’s largest meat company, JBS, is planning a US$ 2.5 billion expansion that locals fear will threaten livelihoods and undermine food security.
All over the world local communities are threatened by the same Big Ag playbook: bulldozing lands, extracting profit and leaving behind pollution and contamination. So this isn’t just a local dispute over a construction permit. It’s a battle between community and corporate extraction.
We can’t let Big Ag use our rivers as a sewer for their industrial waste.
Locals showed me the way. I proudly took a stand to protect their land, and the beautiful Drava river against corporations like MHP, that only serve billionaires and their shareholders.
Just like in Sisak, Croatia, where local people drew a line and the Chicken King backed down, today, on the banks of the Amazon of Europe, the message to Big Ag remains exactly the same.
Not here, not anywhere.
Dániel Nyitray is Global Campaign Lead for Big Ag at Greenpeace International based in Hungary.
