Sheep Plague Costs Romania €128m

In six Croatian counties, sheep farmers have spent the past fortnight pouring milk down the drain. The sheep are healthy. The milk is there. But veterinary restrictions mean no collector can take it, so the product has no route to market.

Across the border, Romania's national sheep and goat breeders' federation says the sector has already lost €128 million because export channels have been blocked (Digi24). That figure comes from the sector itself, not from an independent audit. Still, the distress behind it is real, and it is moving through southeastern Europe faster than the official language of veterinary control can quite capture.

How PPR Freezes Trade

The disease at the centre of this is PPR, or peste des petits ruminants, a highly contagious virus affecting sheep and goats. It brings fever, mouth lesions and pneumonia, but it does not threaten human health. The risk is movement: an animal shipped from an infected area can carry the outbreak into another flock, another region, another country (WOAH).

The single market is often spoken about as if it simply removed borders. For live animals, it replaced them with veterinary trust. A Romanian sheep can enter Italy only because Romanian vets can certify where it came from, what controls apply there, and whether those controls can be relied on. PPR is a listed disease under the EU Animal Health Law (Regulation 2016/429), which means it automatically triggers mandatory controls across Europe. Once certification is in doubt, trade does not stop at a customs barrier. It stops in the paperwork before the animal ever moves.

Romania's national veterinary authority has imposed a 30-day quarantine on all sheep and goats, with limited exceptions for animals sent directly to slaughter. Because the quarantine is national, healthy flocks in unaffected areas are commercially trapped with infected ones.

EU rules allow for precise zoning: protection zones, surveillance zones and restriction zones, each intended to contain disease while letting unaffected areas continue trading. Romania's blanket measure suggests the authorities cannot yet draw those lines with enough confidence for others to trust them.

A Corridor Under Stress

The evidence so far points less to Romania's competitors quietly gaining ground than to a regional livestock corridor under strain. Bulgaria cannot export sheep and goats until the end of September, while Greece faces similar limits until the end of October (Agri.bg). Bulgaria has hosted a THRACE programme meeting on cross-border disease control with Greece and Turkey, treating the problem as a shared frontier risk rather than the failure of one state.

Hungary is trying to hold the line. Hungarian agricultural sources describe the priority as preserving disease-free status, stopping illegal shipments and checking documentation at each stage (Agrárágazat, VG). Disease-free status is not just a label. It is an economic asset. If Hungary loses it, its own export-oriented sheep sector runs into the same wall (Agro Napló).

Croatia shows the most immediate damage. Protection and surveillance zones in six counties have stopped milk collection altogether. The producers' association Ruka has demanded 100% compensation for lost deliveries. No official settlement has been confirmed.

Who Pays When Certification Fails

The bill lands first on farmers, hauliers, assembly centres and milk processors, all the businesses built around the assumption that animals and animal products can move. The benefit of stopping that movement is collective and harder to see: every country that avoids an outbreak keeps its own export access. The losses, by contrast, are immediate and fall heavily on people who may have done nothing to cause the problem.

One detail from Romanian reporting shows why credibility matters. Hungarian-language Romanian media reported that 75 sheep registered as culled in Tulcea county were later found alive on a farm in Cluj county. An enforcement failure of that kind damages the trust on which EU certification rules depend. And it is trust, more than tariffs, that will decide when Romania's export channels reopen.

For live animals, the single market rests on something more delicate than regulation. It depends on the credibility of national veterinary systems. When that credibility weakens in one country, the damage travels through every neighbour whose herds, trade routes and disease-free status are tied to it. Romania's breeders are paying the steepest price, but the wider Balkan corridor is being reminded what that invisible infrastructure is worth.