EU's poorest region teeters on the brink

(YAKIMOVO) - The bare fields, the empty roads, the ruined houses and the shuttered schools say it all. Welcome to Bulgaria's rural northwest, officially the poorest region in the European Union.

"There is almost no socioeconomic indicator on which this region does not come last, both in Bulgaria and the EU," Deputy Regional Minister Nikolay Nankov told AFP in a recent interview. "It's not a rosy picture out there."

In the 1970s and 1980s, the region saw massive industrialisation, making goods solely for the communist-era Comecon market. But when the Iron Curtain fell 20 years ago, the factories closed.

Since then, people have become a rarity, with depopulation and ageing taking a grim toll on the small towns, and notably the villages, leaving the once buzzing schools, stately churches and huge cooperative farms in ruins.

"Oh, this was a big village of 9,000 people but it all went to hell," 77-year-old Nikola Georgiev told AFP in the village of Yakimovo, at the heart of Bulgaria's northwest, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) north of the capital Sofia.

Now the village has just 2,000 souls. Unemployment in the local area, where the population now is just 4,300, hit 54.6 percent in September, the highest in the country, media reports said.

"I ache for it, I ache for Bulgaria, for my favourite granddaughter who emigrated to Italy looking for a job. I hope our kids come back home some day," Georgiev said.

There is little work to be found in the nearby towns of Montana and Vratsa, nor in Vidin, further west, where the lonely smoke stacks of long-shut factories are the sole remnant of the region's industrial past.

Smoking house chimneys and the smell of burning coal have taken over instead, as people turned to the cheapest means of heating.

Unemployment in the three towns ranged between 17.6 and 19.9 percent in the first half of 2011, or almost twice the national average of 10.3 percent.

Farming is the main economic activity now in this corner of the fertile Danube valley, but because of outdated farming techniques, crop yields are low.

As a result, the northwest formed just 7.4 percent of the country's gross domestic product in 2009, compared to 48.3 percent for the richest southwestern region, and attracted a mere 2.4 percent of all foreign investment.

The massive demographic slump and severe ageing are also to blame, Nankov said, recounting a "horrifying" 18.3-percent drop in the region's population between the 2001 and 2011 censuses.

"What children? There are no children here," 61-year-old unemployed Detelin Andreev shrugged outside the ruin of the local school in the village of Voynitsa, near Vidin.

"It's only pensioners and unemployed, buying food on tick all the time," the local grocer, who refused to give her name, told AFP in her scantily stocked shop.

The picture was even bleaker on the western arc of the region along the border with Serbia.

"There is no grocery here. Our children come once in a while to bring us food and check if we're alive. There is a bus Tuesdays and Thursdays and we sometimes use it to call a doctor," 70-year-old Nadezhda Pesheva said in the village of Chichil.

What if you fall ill on any other day?

"You go where we all will go, to God the Father," she added, pointing at the village cemetery.

"Come to me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest," read an inscription over the entrance of the local church back in Yakimovo. But its gates are long locked, its courtyard walls covered by obituary notices.

"Everything is falling apart," 82-year-old retired tractor driver Dimitar said on the outskirts of the village of Oshane, backdropped by the huge skeletons of the deserted cooperative sheep-sheds.

"They ruined our farms and chased the young people abroad. But it's all our fault because we voted for them. This country never had decent leaders," he fumed, herding his four or five sheep.

For the minister, the way out was more European aid funds and government money into infrastructure, like the pan-European transport corridor IV and the second bridge to Romania over the Danube near Vidin, now 70-percent ready.

Intensive farming and tourism, as well as boosting regional development projects and trans-border cooperation initiatives with Romania and Serbia are other ways to bring people back and snatch the region from the brink, he added.