Outstanding Features

The described site is located in the area of the commune of Intorsura Buzaului at the foot of the Ciucas Mountain range, on the northern slope of the Curvature Carpathians. It is an area characterized by the two main typical Romanian mobile pastoralist systems , pendulation and transhumance. Pendulation occurs throughout Romania's mountain regions, whereas transhumance now occurs only in a few areas on the northern slope of the Carpathians.

During pendulation livestock are taken short distances (usually up to 20 km) to summer pastures belonging to the community administrations. The summer camp, usually no more than a wooden shack, is located on these pastures and is the shepherd's fixed base for the summer months. Flocks are usually made of sheep and cattle, and can also include pigs, goats, donkeys and horses. The main products of this system are a number of traditional cheeses made from a mixture of sheep and cattle milk. Each household typically owns less than ten sheep, a couple of cows and a few hectares of hay meadows that provide fodder for the livestock during winter months.

Only sheep are taken on transhumance, a system which involves movements over 2-300 km from summer pastures near the mountain villages in the transhumant centres of southern Transylvania to lowland winter pastures in the two Romanian regions of “Ţara Românească” (Wallachia) and Moldavia. Transhumant flocks generally belong to families who own large numbers of sheep and do not have enough grassland to provide food for their livestock during the whole winter. The flocks vary in size, generally ranging from 1000 to 2000 sheep. Several shepherds, donkeys carrying their personal items, and livestock guarding dogs accompany every transhumant flock. The flocks leave the mountains in early October and take around two months to complete the journey to the winter grazing pastures, where they stay until after lambing in February and March, after which they make their journey back to reach home by Easter.

Historically, transhumance has played an important role in the development and exchange of cultures and traditions between different regions of Europe and further east. Before the redefinition of Romania's borders in the early 1900's, Romanian transhumance flocks travelled as far as the Crimea to the east and to Bohemia in the west. Linguistic evidence demonstrates that, in the Carpathians, pastoral production practices originated in Romania and then spread northwards along the mountain chain. Many Romanian traditions, songs, foods, and words, for example, have their roots in pastoralism and form an integral part of Romanian's cultural identity.

Transhumance and pendulation possess both biophysical and socio-cultural diversity: the movements occur between lowlands and mountain ranges, between different climatic regions, between two ecoregions (e.g. Carpathians – Danube floodplains) and between different cultural and economic realities. This pastoral system has been sustainable for centuries both from the ecological and from the socio-economic point of view. There has been a permanent flow of resources and information between shepherds, the livestock owners and their families.

The two million hectares of semi-natural grasslands in Romania's mountain regions exhibit an outstanding level of biodiversity in Europe and are a direct legacy of a long history of pastoral management practices incorporating elements of mobility. With appropriate and effective support, this type of pastoralism has the potential to continue to support sustainable human-environmental relations in the long term.

Transhumance and pendulation have driven extensive cultural exchanges and many Romanian and Carpathian terminologies, traditions, foods and songs have their roots in these practices. The national poem, Mioriţa, is about shepherds and is said to be equivalent to the Iliad in terms of being a representation of the identity of a nation.

Goods and Services Provided

Extensive pastoral systems in Romania, incorporating elements of mobility, support many livelihoods in areas where opportunities for alternative incomes are limited. In addition, this form of pastoralism provides high-quality products for which there is a strong demand amongst the general Romanian population. Such traditional systems are increasingly being valued in Europe for producing food sustainably, in a way that is both environmentally sensitive and ‘healthy'.

By incorporating a complimentary upland and lowland resource use, they have created and maintain specific landscape types, which would be inexistent without these systems. Pastoral landscape types are highly attractive to both national and international tourists.

Threats and Challenges

At present, many people in the mountain areas in Romania still depend on semi-subsistence pastoralism for their livelihoods. However, the inherent ingenuity to biophysical and socio-cultural constraints is no longer strong enough to overcome the threats posed to these systems in the last ten years or so, since the changes in political and economic circumstances have resulted in the restructuring of the agricultural sector towards favouring intensive production and changes in land tenure. The main threat to the viability of these systems now is the impact of the policies of the EU, which support the development of intensive livestock production systems.

Pendulation and transhumance systems in Romania clearly display the impact of many threats pastoral systems typically have been facing throughout Europe and the world, including:

• adoption of blanket agricultural policies aligned with those of the European Union and designed for intensive and sedentary livestock production;
• recent and rapid increased economic competition from imported products;
• lack of a sound legal and policy background;
• lack of appropriate technologies and infrastructure;
• trails used in the past centuries no longer exist, shepherds often face conflicts with foresters, landowners and the authorities;
• lack of awareness amongst decision makers and the wider population of the multiple benefits that these systems deliver to society, including biodiversity conservation;
• lack of knowledge of Romanian central/local authorities regarding biodiversity conservation with all related implications;
• lack of market and market policy for local, natural and healthy products such as cheese, milk and meat;
• there has been a big decrease in wool industry during the past few years and in many places the market for this type of product already disappears;
• harsh working conditions and poor financial returns for shepherds make it difficult to employ skilled people for taking care of livestock.

The fact that mobile pastoralism is still widespread in Romania now is partly due to the still unstable transition economy of the country. Yet there are clear signs that the systems are beginning to decline and that, unless action is taken, they will undergo a rapid demise with subsequent detrimental consequences for livelihoods, the environment and the exceptional agricultural biodiversity that is now so unique in Europe.

Policy and Development Relevance

The culture and know-how of shepherding is very much still alive, arguably more so than in any other country in Europe. Upon accession to the European Union, Romania will need to designate Natura 2000 sites and maintain these sites to a “favourable conservation status”. In addition, Romania will need to achieve the conservation of habitats in the wider countryside. The only practicable, socially acceptable and sustainable management of high nature value landscapes in Europe involves low intensity farming. Likewise, experience from northwest Europe has shown that conservation management techniques applied to remnants of pastoral habitats are expensive and often fail to maintain the ecological interest.

Regretfully, recognition of the multiple benefits that mobile pastoral systems can deliver to society, including the conservation of agricultural-biodiversity, has come too late in most of Europe, where many transhumance and pendulation systems are now extinct. Such systems have disappeared because they were unable to compete with the huge amount of resources that have been directed towards developing arguably unsustainable industrial and sedentary livestock systems. In Romania, mobile pastoral systems are still widespread at present, and can be said to be lighthouses of sustainable agriculture.

Global Importance

Pendulation and transhumance systems in Romania fulfil the multifunctional principles of the European Model of Agriculture by delivering a number of benefits and public goods (beyond the production of high quality and healthy products) to both national, European and global society. These systems are representative of the highly mobile pastoral practices used by a large number of people throughout the world. Romania is particularly outstanding in the European context where pastoralism has faced a rapid decline since the industrialisation of agriculture with a subsequent decrease in the environmental sustainability of livestock production and agricultural biodiversity. Moreover, pastoralism is a ‘living' culture in Romania, which has the potential to be recognised through global heritage initiatives, and can act as a benchmark for extensive and organic livestock farming throughout the rest of Europe and the world.