Polish farmers face ruin under EU

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, March 27, 2004
After May 1, East Europe's 'Haves' May Have More
By ALAN COWELL

SYTNA GORA, Poland ? For 60 years in this place of lakes and forests, 
Gerard Pakura's life has unfolded in step with Europe's history, from the 
Nazi occupation of his land to the rise and fall of Soviet Communism.

But when his country enters the European Union on May 1 as one of 10 new 
members, Mr. Pakura may well discover that this latest redrawing of the 
political landscape is one upheaval too many for peasant farmers like him 
with no evident niche in the big and brawny Europe that Poland is about to 
join.

As Europe expands in a quest for prosperity and elusive unity, many among 
its new members in the East fear that hundreds of thousands of people may 
be left behind in a new underclass, throwbacks to the lost era of command 
economies and state control.

The European Union has always known its relative disparities, and to create 
a unified whole it has over the decades self-consciously transferred wealth 
from richer countries like Germany and Luxembourg to poorer ones like 
Portugal, Greece and Ireland.

But never before has the union invited into its well-padded ranks the kind 
of economic malaise to be found in rural Poland, the eastern reaches of 
Slovakia and Hungary and the countryside of the Baltics.

So daunting is the challenge that the 15 current members have decided that 
leveling the playing field is not an option, at least not fully, not for 
the foreseeable future.

Most of the agricultural subsidies that take up almost half of the European 
Commission's annual budget of $120 billion will not be available to farmers 
like Mr. Pakura and his neighbors in the other new eastern members, because 
extending the benefit was deemed too costly.

Farm subsidies for the new entrants will start at just a quarter of the 
western levels, rising to parity only by 2013. In the meantime, small-scale 
farmers in the East worry that they will be wiped out by agribusiness in 
the West, where subsidies on average provide a quarter of the income of 
most current European Union farmers.

"Everybody is trying to find a job," said Sylvester Frankowski, 18, who 
earns around $200 a month as a foot soldier in the Polish Army and has just 
returned to this hamlet of eight houses from a six-month stint in Iraq.

"They don't want to stay on the farm," he said, "they are afraid that in 
the E.U. the farms will be too small to exist."

Among new entrants, Poland is a particularly extreme example of dependence 
on small-scale agriculture and the biggest challenge among the group to the 
system of farm subsidies that both underpins European agriculture and 
inspires such furious arguments in the broader debate over the global trade 
in farm products.

In Poland about one-fifth of the work force is still on the land ? five 
times the current European Union average. More than half of those farms 
cover less than 12 acres, about a quarter of the European average, 
according to Andrzej Zedura, a government official.

Poland employs 19 percent of its work force on the land compared with, say, 
about 6 percent in Hungary or, among the "old" Europeans, about 4 percent 
in France, according to European Union figures.

It has 45.5 million acres under cultivation ? almost as much as the 48.4 
million acres of the nine other new member countries combined.

So for Poland the potential disruption to the economy and to generations of 
rural life is enormous. But even as Poles seek to leave the farm, jobs are 
hardly plentiful in the rest of the economy, and wages compared with 
current members are barely more than a pittance.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/27/international/europe/27EURO.html

Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org