Archived Articles

Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.

He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.

In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.

Global Real Estate Project
News Index

Directories
  Int'l Realty
  US Realty

While visiting Bulgaria, the Russian president Putin signed several memoranda. Among them is the 'South Stream' project, another large Russian gas transportation pipeline that would pass through Bulgarian, among the other, territories. The experts already discuss the 'high politics' and 'high economics' of this project. They will be briefly summarized here, without going into any details. What will be presented here is another dimension of the project, namely its ability to bring additional value to many abandoned lands in the Balkans.

The natural gas, unlike the oil, is more difficult to transport. Its low density makes necessary building special cargo vessels, where the energy is condensed into liquids. Somehow cheaper way to bring the fuel up to the consumers is through pipelines, but this way creates many problems in terms of logistics. One of them, but by far not the only one, is the political situation in countries that are located between the producer and the final buyer(s). This makes the gas market, unlike the oil market, much more centralized, much less flexible to the market forces, and much more dependent on political whims of otherwise secondary actors.

Europe has few major suppliers of natural gas, and Russia is among the most promising among them. For Russia the natural gas isn't only a good way of making more money, but also a good way of projecting its political and economic influence in near and far-away countries. Instead of relaying on only one country, Ukraine, for the gas transportation, Moscow has tried for more than a decade to diversify its exporting infrastructures, through building the 'Blue Stream' pipeline to Turkey across the Black Sea, and by drawing projects for building alternative pipelines to Central Europe, bypassing Ukraine by north.

The most recent among these alternative pipelines is the 'South Stream' project, passing through the Black Sea to Bulgaria, and from there to its Balkan neighbors, with the ultimate goal of reaching Italy and Central Europe and their fast growing markets. The political and economic experts have already started discussing the 'high politics' and the 'high economics' of this project. To put it briefly, the bottom line is always that this project will bring Russia back into the Balkans, a region it seemed to have deserted after the war in Kosovo in 1999.

The element that is of higher interest is the ability of this project to bring additional value to many undeveloped or underdeveloped lands in the Balkans. Without knowing the exact location of the future pipeline(s), it's safe to say that it would pass through many abandoned lands. Almost two decades after the fall of the communism, the agriculture in Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and to a certain degree in Serbia and Macedonia are still recovering. The peasant population has abandoned the lands for the major cities.

To illustrate this point, between 1989 and 2008 in Bulgaria the general population through natural causes and emigration has fallen from 9 million to 7 million. During the same period, the population occupied in the agriculture has fallen from more than 25 percent to less than 10 percent. In other words, almost eighty percent of the peasants have either died or have abandoned their lands in less than 20 years. In most Balkan countries the undeveloped lands are getting more expensive since recently. In anticipation of future major projects, ruthless local companies are buying out from impoverished peasants. The announcement of the new project, no doubt, will accelerate this process.

--------------------

See also the directory of companies providing real estate services in, and general real estate information of Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Albania, and Macedonia.