Gunpowder cotton. The Rheinmetall military plant offers hope for a revival in agriculture

Saturday, Dec 13, 2025

Mediapool

German investment in a new gunpowder plant links cotton supply to Bulgarian agriculture, despite local industry struggles.

🔗 Read the article on mediapool.bg

[This is an automatically generated summary, for reference only]

The potential investment by Germany’s Rheinmetall in a new gunpowder factory could involve cotton, which is a raw material for military gunpowder, and Bulgaria is one of the countries in the EU that cultivates it alongside Greece and Spain. However, a Mediapool check indicates that local production faces significant challenges due to a lack of demand, markets, and low purchase prices.

🔗 Read the original article

Previous page Anti-corruption fury and fear of a "Romanian scenario": How massive protests in Bulgaria, which brought out young people from Generation Z, toppled the government led by two prominent political figures
Next page The four-day workweek is causing a stir in Europe: could this become a reality in Lithuania?

© 2026 Pulse - Europe beyond the beat


PULSE is an initiative for cross-border collaborative journalism in Europe co-funded by the European Commission under Grant Agreement n. PO 4500158093.

PULSE is an initiative coordinated by OBCT that has been promoting intensive journalistic cross-border collaborations in Europe since 2024. Its main aim is to help strengthen the European public sphere by reporting on and telling stories from new and diverse perspectives.

At the heart of PULSE are 10 leading national news outlets (Delfi – Lithuania, Deník Referendum – Czechia, Der Standard – Austria, EfSyn – Greece, El Confidencial – Spain, Gazeta Wyborcza – Poland, HotNews – Romania, HVG – Hungary, Il Sole 24 Ore – Italy, Mediapool – Bulgaria) and three transnational organisations, including OBCT , n-ost and Voxeurop .

Additional outlets and journalists are involved as associate partners, including EUobserver , Føljeton (Denmark), H-Alter (Croatia), Levila (Estonia), Rubryka (Ukraine), and The Journal Investigates (Ireland).

PULSE is driven by a sort of virtual transnational newsroom made up of journalists from all the publications involved. It collaboratively produces new journalistic content on European issues on a daily basis, coming in many different languages. The editorial output amounts to over a thousand publications per year, mostly in article form.

PULSE also runs 4 thematic networks open to any European journalist interested in crucial issues such as EU enlargement, relations between the EU and other global powers, the EU’s green transition, or media and the information society. These networks function as online communities and periodically publish calls for pitches.