Sheep Plague Costs Romania €128 Million

In six Croatian counties, sheep farmers have spent the past two weeks pouring milk down the drain. Their sheep and goats are healthy, but the veterinary restrictions mean no one can collect the milk. Across the border, Romania's national federation of sheep and goat breeders says the sector has already lost €128 million because export routes have been blocked (Digi24). That figure comes from the industry, not from an independent audit. But the economic damage is no longer confined to Romania.

How PPR Freezes Trade

The disease behind the disruption is PPR, peste des petits ruminants, a highly contagious virus affecting sheep and goats. It causes fever, mouth lesions and pneumonia, but it is not a threat to human health. The danger is in movement: one animal moved from an infected area can carry the outbreak into another region (WOAH).

The EU single market is often described as a borderless space. For live animals, the old border has been replaced by veterinary trust. A Romanian sheep can be sent to Italy only if Romanian veterinary authorities can certify where it came from and that disease controls are credible. PPR is a listed disease under the EU Animal Health Law (Regulation 2016/429), so it automatically triggers Europe-wide controls. When certification is no longer trusted, trade stops at the veterinary desk rather than at customs.

Romania's national veterinary authority has imposed a 30-day quarantine on all sheep and goats, with narrow exceptions for animals sent directly to slaughter. Because the quarantine applies nationally, healthy flocks in unaffected areas are caught in the same commercial lockdown as infected ones.

EU rules allow for targeted zoning: protection zones, surveillance zones and restriction zones, designed to keep unaffected areas trading where possible. Romania's decision to use a blanket quarantine suggests the authorities are not yet confident enough to draw those lines.

A Corridor Under Stress

The evidence so far points less to competitors taking Romania's market share than to a whole livestock corridor under pressure. Bulgaria cannot export sheep and goats until the end of September, while Greece faces similar limits until the end of October (Agri.bg). Bulgaria also hosted a THRACE programme meeting on cross-border animal disease control with Greece and Turkey. The framing there was clear: this is a shared frontier risk, not simply one country's administrative failure.

Hungary is trying to keep the disease out. Hungarian agricultural sources describe the priority as preserving disease-free status, stopping illegal shipments and checking paperwork at each stage (Agrárágazat, VG). Disease-free status is an economic asset in itself. If Hungary loses it, its own export-oriented sheep sector runs into the same wall (Agro Napló).

Croatia shows how quickly the controls hit ordinary producers. Protection and surveillance zones in six counties 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 falls first on farmers, hauliers, assembly centres and milk processors: everyone whose business depends on animals moving. The benefit is collective but less visible. Every country that avoids an outbreak protects its own access to export markets. The losses, meanwhile, are immediate and concentrated 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 that trust, not tariffs, which will decide when Romania's export routes reopen.

For live animals, the single market depends on something more delicate than regulation. It depends on the credibility of national veterinary systems. When that credibility breaks in one country, the consequences move across borders, through herds, transport routes and disease-free certificates. Romania's breeders are carrying the heaviest loss for now, but the whole Balkan livestock corridor is being reminded what happens when that invisible infrastructure fails.