I’ve just spent a week in Moldova, the tiny republic that boarders Ukraine that is trying to pick itself up by its bootstraps and join the EU. And it’s doing a good job as it has become a leading accession candidate. But it is very small and very poor, which makes becoming a member of the union a no brainer. Small and poor countries have tended to flourish in the EU.

The city of Chisinau was an unexpected pleasure. Amazingly clean, the parks that dot the capital make it one of the greenest in Europe. They are clips and trimmed, full of little cafes and families pushing strollers or walking their dogs. There is little trash and almost no one smokes. Pedestrians stand orderly at the crossings, like Germans, patiently waiting for the little man to turn green, even if there are no cars approaching on the wide boulevards that dissect the small city.

The country’s one treasure is it chernozem, “black earth,” the most fertile soil on the planet, making it  home to fabulous agricultural sector. Wine, fruit and veg dominate the tables and export profile. I love travelling in the east as the food is real: Moldovan tomatoes are meaty and taste intensely of tomatoes, unlike the watered-down pulp that is sold in the EU as faux food.

But other than the wine the country has little to work with. It’s other great resource is people; hardworking, polite if a little dour, and well educated but willing to work for low wages as the country has few other natural resources.

For the government it’s an uphill battle. Other countries with similar profiles – and Georgia springs to mind - have done well capitalising on what little it has and the government has identified its strengths and building up investment.

Beyond agriculture, the fastest growing sector last year was tourism, up by a quarter year-on-year, with the small Chisinau airport seeing passenger traffic up by a third to 6mn visitors. Moldova still remains off the beaten path, as half of those visitors are from the diaspora returning home to see friends and family (Moldovans, like Ukrainians, have visa free entry to the EU as a prospective member), but the number of international travellers is growing, mainly from Italy, Germany and Scandinavia.

They come for the wine and green countryside. This week was Moldova’s National Wine week, the biggest event on the calendar, where it seems half the country turns out to the main square in the heart of Chisinau to drink eat and dance. Lines of booths dish out plentiful cheap and delicious wine the country has been producing for thousands of years. A side road is packed with stands roasting whole pigs and small foul in a scene out of an Asterix comic. In Soviet-times, half of the entire wine production of the USSR came from Moldova. Further east it is still famous as the source of quality wine and on tables from Chisinau to Vladivostok. While the Georgians have successfully marketed their similarly ancient wine in the West, Moldova has yet to get that far, but the best of Moldovans wine can compete with anything that Georgia produces. (Incidentally, Albania has equally good wine that is just as ancient, and is even less well known than Moldovan wine.)

The tourists also come for the cheap density and cardiological medical procedures as medical tourism is flourishing. That has also seen an influx of students from Asia and even north America, who come to study medicine and technology at Moldova’s universities.

IT is another sector that is booming on the bases of the combination of location, price and quality. On the eastern borders of Europe, Moldova is ideally placed as an IT hub for coding and outsourcing. But its excellent higher education facilities have produced a generation of expert programmers and the low national wages make their services affordable. Natalia Bejan, the head of Invest Moldova, told IntelliNews that most planes and cars you have ridden in around the world probably carry some made-in-Moldova components and software.

During the business week, the EU together with France launched a €1mn innovation fund aimed at providing pre-seed and early-stage funding for new start-ups to broaden the base, and the Moldovan International Technology Park (MITP) is pushing the development of a sector that is already earning $1bn a year in exports as of last year.

And there is some manufacturing. Central Europe and Romania have attracted carmakers who have set up car plants based on the high-quality low-cost work force. Moldova lacks the people for a full-scale industrial investments into large volume production. It also lacks the domestic consumer market that are always part of the calculation by OEMs on where to locate factories. Instead, Moldova has focused on making parts to service these companies and caters mainly to German car markets, producing high quality widgets for use in their assembly lines int eh countries to the north of the republic.

But it exists in a tense neighbourhood. During the week of the investment conference five drones wandered over its boarders to crash on its territory as incursions become more common – although it remains unclear who’s drones they were: Russian or Ukrainian drones that has had flown off course due to electronic jamming.

Most Moldovans this correspondent talked to were resigned to the tensions and the threat of a Russian invasion. The war has gone on for nearly five years, and the locals have gotten used to it.

Transnistria remains occupied by Russian forces, but of the 1,000 soldiers stationed there, most were local born, Moldovans in effect, and the border remains open with traffic flowing back and forth each day; you only need to register as you enter and get a permit you surrender on the way out. Bejan says her husband was born there and they go at least once a month to visit relatives. Previously you could only spend the local currency, recognised by no one else, but in the meantime the local shops have already begun to accept the Moldovan lei as well.

The big change in relations with Transnistria is after Russia cut off its gas supplies, causing an energy crisis in Moldova, the republic has entirely switched to imports from its friends in the West – mostly Romania and Ukraine – and is now transitioning rapidly to green energy to break its dependence entirely. This summer for the first time there were a few days when the whole of the republic’s energy needs were supplied from renewables.

EU membership is top of the agenda and the Republic is already starting to receive meaningful amount of EU transition funds to pay for basic infrastructure that should be an economic multiplier. But the accession process is slow despite Moldova’s status as top candidate country (baked into the process by local geopolitics, partly thanks to the Russian threat) and t4he current target date is 2030.

Despite the progress the interested remains muted. Few major multinationals turned up to the business week, where the representatives were from smaller companies with warehousing supplies in the lead

Ukrainian businesses are more present as they relocated production and particularly logistics into the republic to escape the Russian bombs.

Ukrainians were everywhere during the wine days and throughout the city – from the poorest refugees begging on the street to the well to do middle class Ukrainian over for a holiday close to home and to enjoy the early autumn sun and wine.

Igor and Olga were visiting from their new home in the UK to see relatives who had come to Moldova for the holidays. Igor happened to be in the UK when the war started and was unable to fly home. After martial law was declared the family decided to stay in the UK and with a help of a British sponsor, they found on Facebook they camped out for eight months before finally getting their own home in Canary Wharf. Lucky Igor was already running a trading business and now they spend half their time in London and half in Indonesia where his business is.

They were some of the lucky ones. There are many Ukrainian refugees wandering around in Chisinau the poorest in an already poor nation.