We have already seen AI-generated visualisations of what Szeged might look like with a dried-up Tisza and a desertified landscape. The picture is not quite so bleak, but the fact remains that our lakes and rivers are facing record-low water levels, while vast swathes of the country are turning to desert. Hungary’s 19th-century water-management system, and the agricultural model built upon it, now require urgent and thorough overhaul. Hungarian agriculture as it is known today may disappear — but what comes next? A new study by Hungarian researchers offers some clues.
Wheat, maize and sunflower in the Great Plain desert?
There are many reasons for the drying of the Great Plain, above all ourselves: the descendants of those who, in the mid-19th century, decided that every last patch of land must be brought under cultivation. There was even an idea to drain Lake Balaton and farm that too. To this was added the torment of Hungary’s reduced status after Trianon, when successive governments sought to secure stable foreign currency earnings through the export of arable crops, chiefly cereals. The situation did not change under communism either: the fertile Hungarian soil was thus required to produce wheat, maize and sunflower rather than fruit and vegetables. That era, however, may now be drawing to a close.
We too have reported in numerous articles on the desertification of the Great Plain. The essence of these reports can perhaps be summed up as follows: without intervention, vast areas may become unfit for human habitation, and certainly for agriculture. The reasons are climate change, drought, low rainfall, and the lack of irrigation and water retention. The artificial water system of the Carpathian Basin — and within it Hungary — has, since the days of Széchenyi and Vasvári, been geared towards draining away as quickly as possible the precipitation arriving here as runoff or melting snow, and sending it beyond the country’s borders.
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The soil-water table has paid the price. During extreme droughts, groundwater has sunk so low that it now lies beneath the root zone of plants. In other words, there may be arable land available, but if accessible water disappears from the soil, crops cannot survive.
What could replace it?
According to researchers, the answer lies in water retention and a wholesale rethinking of land use. In areas where cultivation is kept alive only by EU subsidies, arable farming should be abandoned and priority given instead to retaining water. One new study suggests that, in practice, this would mean flooding 1.5 million hectares of arable land — almost a third of the country’s total cultivated area.
The effect would be twofold: groundwater levels would rise, the root zone would once again reach the water table, and maize yields could increase by 20 to 28 per cent, while today’s droughts effectively wipe out everything in their path.
On poorer land, too, it may make more sense to switch back to the once-familiar practice of pasture-based farming, or to higher-value vegetable and fruit production. Naturally, this would need to be done using the most advanced drip-irrigation technology and other water-saving methods. That, too, may be in farmers’ interests: the study argues that on many marginal sites, conventional arable farming can now be sustained only with subsidies, while loss-making farming makes little sense either for farmers or for the Hungarian economy.
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Change is coming
The key to change is therefore not irrigation alone. Water must be retained, farming adapted to the landscape, and intensive production concentrated where the conditions genuinely allow it.
The study, published in the journal Geography and Sustainability, was carried out by 15 Hungarian researchers and was supplemented in the article by Zsolt Pinke, a researcher at the Institute of Soil Sciences of the HUN-REN Centre for Agricultural Research, as reported by Válasz Online.
Perhaps the study’s most important message is this: the question is not whether Hungarian agriculture will change, but whether we adapt deliberately to a drying Great Plain — or wait until drought forces the issue.
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