But the Pekalas are scared. In recent years Jerzy, 41, has been treated for severe depression and Katarzyna, 39, has grown increasingly embittered as the couple has struggled with the farm’s worsening debts. Because of heavily subsidized imports from the European Union, the Pekalas say, hog prices have plunged roughly 50 percent in the past two years, and wheat prices haven’t fared much better. “Our costs keep rising and our prices keep dropping,” Jerzy says. “By the time we join the EU, our farm won’t exist at all.”
No one can say how long that will be. Along with the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia, Estonia and Cyprus, the Polish government is campaigning hard to join the EU by 2003. Poland, the biggest of the lot, has been an especially eager candidate–until recently. Now the plight of farmers like the Pekalas is starting to sour the Polish public on the idea of joining the Union. The latest opinion polls say popular support has dropped below 50 percent for the first time, to 46 percent. About a third of the respondents described themselves as undecided, and less than 20 percent have said they are flatly opposed to joining. But Poland’s leaders are increasingly worried about how the rising anti-EU sentiment, particularly among farmers, might affect a future referendum on the question. After all, fully 25 percent of Poles list agriculture as their primary source of income. “As EU membership draws closer, people are beginning to ask what this will mean for them,” warns Pawel Samecki of Poland’s Committee for European Integration. “Farmers worry that they’ll lose their livelihoods.”
In many cases those worries are entirely justified. The EU already spends 40.7 billion euro a year–almost half its annual budget–on farm subsidies. With the Union trying to scale back its payments to French farmers, no one wants to expand the umbrella to cover 2 million Poles. Many small subsistence farmers are unlikely to meet the minimum registration standards to qualify for assistance. Even so, the Union could be stuck with additional costs of some 2 billion euro. Alarmed at the prospect, the EU is pressing for an urgent overhaul of Polish farming before the country can be welcomed into the club.
Most Poles continue to farm the old-fashioned way. The typical Polish farmstead is only half the 18-hectare size of the average agricultural enterprise in the EU, where only 6 percent of the population earns a living by growing and harvesting food. “Poland has yet to launch a substantial transformation [of agriculture],” an EU report warned last month. “In the last 12 months, the crisis in this sector has deepened.”
The report failed to mention that the EU’s own policies have seriously worsened the problem. Brussels has promised the Poles generous amounts of rural-development aid starting next year. Meanwhile, however, the Union is mercilessly battering Poland’s farmers in the marketplace. The EU does not seem satisfied that its annual food trade surplus with Poland is about $500 million. Last year, after the Russian economy tanked, the Union sharply undercut Polish food exports there as well. The Poles were not the losers in a free-market competition; they were the victims of the EU’s hefty export subsidies. Yet when Warsaw recently raised import duties on pork products, Brussels promptly complained that the tariff violated the rules of free trade. “This is European hypocrisy,” charges Jerzy Plewa, Poland’s deputy minister of Agriculture. “Poland can’t compete with the EU in terms of export subsidies.”
Still, many Polish farmers curse their government for letting them down. Andrzej Lepper, a populist firebrand, heads a spreading agrarian movement called Self-Defense, vowing to defend Poland’s “political and economic sovereignty” by shunning Western organizations such as NATO and the EU. Claiming 500,000 members, Lepper’s group feeds angry farmers a steady diet of conspiracy theories while organizing them to set up protest barricades on the highways. Lepper asserts that the destruction of Polish agriculture is part of a government plot to let foreigners–especially Germans–buy up Poland’s assets at bargain prices. He claims: “What Hitler didn’t achieve by killing millions of people, they’re now achieving by economic means.”
The protests have not swayed Polish officials from their commitment to Europe. Lepper, they insist, is offering an illusion, not a solution. “Switzerland or Norway can live outside of the EU,” says Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek, noting that more than two thirds of Poland’s trade is with the EU. “Poland cannot. The Polish economy needs EU membership as much as we need air to breathe.” Turning back would be no use anyway. With or without EU membership, Poland’s farmers are in for an agonizing period of modernization. To be competitive, they will have to meet the higher quality and sanitary standards set by free-market consumers. Even tougher, Polish agriculture will have to raise its efficiency–and that means bigger farms and fewer farmers.
Some farmers are already going under. Ewa Blieska, 36, and her 38-year-old husband, Wieslaw, raise some rye and oats and a few pigs and cows on their farm in Zakrzewo, a village about 150 kilometers north of Warsaw. Their barn’s roof is caving in, and the yard outside is a cemetery of broken-down machinery. “It’s a slow death on these farms,” she says. “Everything is falling apart.” Even if some miracle could keep their place afloat until Poland joins the EU, they are a poor bet to meet Brussels’s standards for subsidies.
Bigger, more productive farmers like the Pekalas would have a good chance of qualifying. But the prospect only gives an extra twist of cruelty to their present distress. “If they’d give me the subsidies the EU farmer gets, I’d survive,” says Jerzy Pekala. “But I won’t survive three more years of the current economic situation.” Poland’s farmers are a tough breed. Throughout the decades of communist rule, most of them fiercely resisted collectivization and stubbornly kept their small private holdings. The sad fact is that in finally winning their freedom, many of them have probably lost the way of life they defended for so long.
