These days, though, Master talks of selling his pigs. Two cows are already gone, and a whole way of life may soon follow. The reason: Poland’s new membership in the European Union. Suddenly, the pressure is on to adopt the same industrial-scale agriculture that has transformed the country’s affluent Western neighbors. And that, in turn, could signal the gradual disappearance of a centuries-old way of life for tens of thousands of Poland’s peasant farmers.
What an irony. Almost alone in Eastern Europe, Poland escaped the huge collectivizations enforced elsewhere under communism. Instead, land was carved into narrow strips to be shared out among villagers. Today Poland boasts nearly 2 million farms, averaging just 7.2 hectares each–less than a fifth the size of a typical French or British farm. Don’t look for shiny new tractors and harvesters, either. Horses often haul Polish plows and carts. And environmentally damaging chemical fertilizers are almost unknown.
To be sure, the EU offers some enticing rewards, not least access to the rich markets of Western Europe and fat agricultural subsidies from Brussels. Farm incomes should rise 35 percent over the next year, according to government estimates–which explains why most farmers voted to join, says Krzysztof Mularczyk of the Foundation for the Development of Polish Agriculture.
Longer term, however, Poles must learn to compete in the broader European market. EU hygiene standards, previously unknown in Poland, must be complied with. By some accounts, Poles have already slaughtered thousands of cattle rather than meet EU rules on documentation. Meanwhile, foreigners, most notably the Danes and Dutch, are lining up to buy cheap Polish farmland. Aging Polish farmers, who are strapped for cash and whose children are opting for the cities, can be pardoned for selling. Experts foresee the start of a long process of consolidation. “If Poland still has 500,000 farms in 20 years,” says Mularczyk, “that will be a lot.”
That prospect is causing disquiet. Poland’s fast-growing populist party Samoobrona, or Self-Defense, led by fierce Euroskeptic Andrzej Lepper, draws much of its support from Poles alarmed at the pace of change in rural life. In the past, protests organized by Samoobrona have blocked roads and railways carrying imported German grain. With unemployment at about 20 percent, many argue, Poland can ill afford the loss of farming jobs.
The loudest complaints come from the country’s small but growing eco-lobby. The introduction of West European farming not only threatens to displace Poland’s peasants but could destroy one of the last and largest of Europe’s ecologically pristine regions. Bigger, richer farms will surely mean the wider use of chemicals and other destructive elements of industrial agriculture. “If the small farms die out, the landscape will be changed completely,” says Dorota Metera, who represents the World Conservation Union in Warsaw. The Polish countryside, she says, has maintained the kind of natural diversity that’s been sacrificed to the interests of agribusiness elsewhere in Europe. Wolves and bears still roam the patch of primeval forest on the country’s eastern borders. Amid the famed Mazurian lakes and elsewhere, farmland is scattered with small ponds and untended fields and forests that offer ideal habitats for a hugely varied range of birds and insects that are vanishing elsewhere.
Understandably, the farmers’ first concern is for their livelihoods, rather than the countryside. Besides, the risks aren’t at once apparent, says Pavel Sidlow of the Polish Society for the Protection of Birds: “If you have grown up with such diversity all around you, then you just can’t imagine it disappearing.” But the experience of Western Europe should promote caution, conservationists argue. Since 1980 the number of farm birds in Western Europe has dropped by a third, mostly through the heavy use of chemicals and the draining of ancient wetlands.
Salvation might lie in making a strength of Poland’s weakness. The poverty that prevented the widespread use of chemicals means that, by default, much of the country’s produce is organic–a potential boon as demand for untainted food soars across the Continent. “It’s a question of grabbing our opportunity,” says Kinga Boenneng of the Heinrich Boll Foundation in Warsaw, which promotes green causes. The snag could be the farmers’ own attitudes. The experience of communist rule left them leery of the kind of collective activism needed to survive modern agrocapitalism. But without it, the EU could well achieve what communism didn’t–the end of Poland’s land-owning peasantry.
