Poland’s EU Bid Raises Farmers’ Hopes, Fears

Anger in her stride, Janina Sotomska walked over to a storage shed, the closest thing to a barn on her small farm, and threw open the doors.

“I’ll show you the wheat we cannot sell,” she said, her tone laced with bitterness. “They bring us wheat from Canada, and we cannot sell our own!”

Before her, on high platforms about 5 feet below the shed’s rafters, were heaps of loose grain mixed with field debris, unprotected against rodents. The wheat weighed a few tons, was worth perhaps a few hundred dollars and seemed quite pitiful compared with the image of huge North American grain elevators.

While the forlorn wheat heap may not have amounted to much in the scheme of global trade, the plight of Polish farmers that it reflected has enormous significance for the effort to build a more united Europe.

An expanded European Union would mean little without Poland, which, with 39 million people, has by far the biggest population and largest economy of the Eastern European states that once were Moscow’s satellites. But the obstacles to integrating Polish agriculture into European Union structures are immense.

Most Polish farmers, who generally operate on a small scale and with limited technology, share Sotomska and her husband’s bitterness toward what they see as unfair competition from imports, especially those produced by heavily subsidized Western European farmers.

The European Union “wants Poland to become a market where they can sell the produce they have in abundance,” complained Andrzej Lepper, the radical leader of the Self-Defense farmers union, which in the past three years has repeatedly used roadblocks around Poland to stage violent protests against farm imports. “We need the protection of our borders from the uncontrollable deluge of agricultural products coming from the West.”

Subsidies to Member Nations

Farmers in the European Union receive subsidies paid directly to them out of the EU budget, while export subsidies help dispose of excess production. The result, in the view of angry and envious Polish farmers, is that their neighbors to the West can both live well and keep their prices lower.

The issue is not exactly that Polish farming is noncompetitive. Offered as pig feed, even small quantities of poorly stored grain like Sotomska’s wheat could have competitive value.

EU policy aims to boost farmers’ incomes to roughly match the average in society at large. The main problem for Polish farmers, however, is that they have a low standard of living and there are so many of them.

The EU spends about $40 billion a year, nearly half its budget, on subsidies for agriculture, with most of that money coming from taxpayers in the richer countries such as Germany. Providing EU subsidies on the same terms to Polish farmers would cost billions more and risk a taxpayer revolt--in short, it might break the bank.

Politicians in this region still speak optimistically of Poland and some of its neighbors joining the European Union as early as Jan. 1, 2003. That might be possible for Hungary and perhaps even the Czech Republic, both of which have much smaller agricultural sectors.

But with 26% of Poland’s labor force employed in agriculture to produce just 6% of the country’s economic output, the dilemma posed by Polish farmers would appear to defy solution in any such limited time frame. As negotiators begin to address the issue, few Polish farmers believe that the question of their fate in an expanded European Union will be resolved quickly in a way that will protect their livelihoods.

Polish family farms survived in private hands even under communism, so the move toward a market economy since the 1989 switch to democracy here hasn’t had much effect on the ownership of agricultural land. But the rural scene is now divided between the approximately 850,000 farms that produce for the market and an additional 1.2 million households that own farmland and use it to grow crops or raise livestock but that sell virtually nothing.

The first category has been hit hard not only by subsidized imports from the European Union but also by a collapse of purchasing power in the former Soviet Union and a more competitive domestic market as state purchases have shrunk. The second category consists largely of pensioners or families who have at least one member working at a nonagricultural job or receiving unemployment benefits.

“There’s a joke that we tell through tears about Polish agriculture: It’s better to have two pensioners on a farm than 15 cows,” said Jerzy Jurkiewicz, 52, a pig farmer in the village of Gaski, 50 miles north of Warsaw.

15 Cows Not Enough to Earn a Living

In addition to its intended point--that many rural people have a harder time getting a steady income from farming than they do from collecting government benefits--the joke contains an unintended insight: In Poland, farmers think that keeping 15 cows should be enough to make a living.

Under communism, Jurkiewicz said, he lived well on the 60-acre family farm that he had inherited, keeping about 17 cows, growing enough grain to feed them and selling the milk and calves.

In 1993, at a time when increasing quality demands made milk production more problematic, he started raising pigs, hoping it would be more profitable than dairy farming. But the succeeding years of free markets have proved a financial disaster for him. The price he gets for pigs is lower now than it was in 1996, while his production and living costs have increased sharply, he said.

“How big my production is really depends on how much feed I get from my fields,” he said. “Last year, with all the rain, the situation was very bad. This year, with the drought [that hit much of Poland in April and May], it will be the same thing.”

Jurkiewicz sold 250 pigs last year and expects to sell about 150 this year. The price ranges between about $50 and $100 a head, depending on market conditions and the pig’s weight.

“I’m working and working, and I get nothing out of it,” Jurkiewicz said. “We have absolutely no money for any renovation or repairs, not to mention new investment or equipment. What we’re eating up is the money that should be invested every year into the farm for it not to lose its value.”

If Poland joined the European Union and its farmers then received EU subsidies comparable to those in other EU countries, he could modernize, buy new machinery and intensify production, Jurkiewicz said. But he doesn’t expect that to happen.

“I always say: ‘We want to join the European Union. The European Union doesn’t want us,’ ” he explained. “It will happen, but we’ll have to wait for the financial issues of the European Union to be solved. Today, the European Union doesn’t have the money for our farmers.”

If the EU is unwilling to grant Polish farmers subsidies under the same rules that apply to other member states, “then it would be better to close the country, raise barriers and try to survive by ourselves,” Jurkiewicz said.

One scenario feared by Polish farmers is that Poland might join the EU under a formula that would drop trade barriers and let the farmers of current member nations continue to receive subsidies while denying subsidies to the farmers in newcomer states. If that happens, Jurkiewicz said, “then I take my rake, I put a white banner on it, and I say, ‘I surrender.’ ”

Poland is insisting that, when it joins the European Union, its farmers should be eligible for equal treatment in terms of benefits and subsidies, said Jacek Szymanderski, spokesman for the country’s Agriculture Ministry.

“We are not ready to join as a second-rank member,” he said.

But he said there is a way out of the cost dilemma, because Poland is not demanding that benefits go to all of the households that have farmland.

“If we talk only about farmers who are living from selling their products on the market, this is not such a big number to be covered by the common agricultural policy,” Szymanderski said. “This is quite a delicate political problem in Poland: Who is a farmer? What is at stake is 800,000 or maybe 900,000 farmers, not 2 million.”

Many of those who are not producing for the market might continue to live on their land and grow food for their own use, but they would be “living from other sources,” he said.

Many farmers, however, remain skeptical that things will work out for them.

Sotomska’s husband, Mieczyslaw Sotomski, 70, compared the European Union’s policies toward Poland to the expansionism of Nazi Germany during World War II.

“Before, it was done militarily,” he said. “Now it’s with capital. Those who today are worrying about our economy so much, not long ago they were killing Poles and putting them into the soil. We should have good international relations, but we also have to remember the sad things that happened.”

His 20-acre farm in the village of Dziekanow Nowy is just outside Warsaw, and Sotomski said the couple earn most of their money from growing flowers for sale in the capital’s markets. But they were better off financially under communism, he said.

“Whatever we produced, we sold,” Sotomski said. “The minus was, even if you had money, there wasn’t much to buy.”

Jurkiewicz, the pig farmer, said he will not push his two sons to follow in his footsteps.

“That will be their decision,” he said. “I’m not going to force them or even encourage them. They know how to count money, how to see what’s profitable or not. When I was taking over the farm, it was very fashionable to say, ‘You cannot leave your father’s land.’ Now people look at the economic side.”

Jurkiewicz talks as if even he would abandon the farm if he could, and he said he regrets not leaving it long ago.

“I went in the army, and they asked me to stay and be a professional soldier,” he said. “But I came back. Now I ask, ‘What for?’ ”