The numbers come first. Persistent drought and scorching heat this summer have hit fish farms and river ecosystems across Central and Southeastern Europe, from the Danube in Serbia to ponds in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bosnia, according to the Associated Press.
In Serbia, a side channel of the Danube in Petrovaradin has shrunk to a couple of ponds where juvenile fish circle in water hotter than 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit). "If they start to die, they will all die at once," fisherman Dusan Jovanovic said.
Hungary's national meteorological service reports that roughly 99% of the country's land is under severe or extreme drought, threatening desertification across the Great Hungarian Plain. The country's Agriculture and Food Economy Ministry said last week that 1,588 hectares (3,924 acres) of Hungary's roughly 27,000 hectares of fish ponds have dried out, killing nearly 280 metric tons of fish at 20 farms. The ministry put the revenue loss at 1.3 billion forints, or $4.2 million.
In Romania, Catalin Platon, president of the ROMFISH National Association of Fish Producers, said carp farmers are still absorbing losses from droughts in 2023 and 2024 because the production cycle runs three to four years. Platon said water-use policies that prioritized irrigation for agriculture during earlier droughts "left us with no water for the fish."
Czech fish farmers have cut or suspended feeding, aerated ponds and drained marginal stocks early, according to the Czech Fishing Association. Jan Sokolik, a technician at the Rybarstvi Trebon fishery, said operators are now weighing what to do with larger ponds still holding water.
In Bosnia, trout farmer Veljko Budjen, who runs an operation near Trebinje, said hot, dry summers force him to cut production and feeding just to keep the business alive, since trout require cold, oxygen-rich water. Adding liquid oxygen is one option; otherwise, he said, "you wait for the first rain."
In Slovenia, firefighters pumped 8 million liters (2 million gallons) of water into Lake Pristava to stave off a mass fish die-off from low oxygen and overgrowth, though Danijel Fras of the Pesnica Lenart Fishing Association said, "We are surprised that any fish has survived at all."
The losses are landing squarely on private operators — family fisheries, carp producers, trout farms — not on the government agencies that allocate water in a crisis. Platon's complaint about irrigation policy crowding out fish farms is instructive: when bureaucrats ration a scarce resource, someone's property gets sacrificed, and it is rarely the politically favored sector.
Europe's fish farmers are now the ones bearing the capital risk of drought while asking governments for water-retention infrastructure rather than subsidy checks. That is the right instinct. Markets adapt through investment in irrigation efficiency, storage and pricing signals for water — not through Brussels mandates that arrive after the ponds have already dried out.
