Brace yourself for the biggest heist of agricultural land in Ukraine since the 16th century land grab by Poland’s magnates.
Among the vultures at that time was the “shlakhta” (nobility) family of Wishniviecki, notorious turncoats who appropriated most of today’s Poltavska Oblast and brought serfdom for peasants in 1628.
Incredibly as it sounds, expect a repeat by today’s oligarchs. Moving fast through the halls of Ukraine’s parliament is a draft law sponsored by President Viktor Yanukovych’s Regions Party that would impose the tentacles of the oligarchs on the entire Ukrainian rural population.
This law, opposed by most players now in the agricultural business, will give a clear upper hand for oligarchs to buy land.
For instance, companies will be able to lease farming land. But only individual citizens would be eligible to own it, and only those who had declared their incomes in the previous year.
It is no secret that most Ukrainians, living from hand to mouth, don’t bother with such disclosures. The hook is that the law would make it easier to challenge and exclude legitimate bidders, given Ukraine’s corrupt judicial system.
Since the privatization epics of the 1990s, agricultural land in Ukraine is owned mostly by villagers, formerly collective farm workers. Land can be inherited and leased, but not sold – at least in theory, although in Ukraine’s byzantine labyrinths some land seems to have been sold to international enterprises.
One of them was described in the Financial Times not long ago, as an unusual venture by Wall Street’s Morgan Stanley that performed poorly and partly blamed local employees, who allegedly were less interested in pay than in opportunities to steal crops – which suggests that pay was not overly generous.
Enter a new era, in which, as Taras Kuzio has aptly described recently in Eurasia Daily Monitor, authorities provide “krysha” (cover) for organized crime.
If the plan for agricultural land ownership prepared by the “Donskoy” boys becomes law, the Ukrainian people will be rolled again. This time it would be by far more brazen and far-reaching in its consequences than any recent privatization fraud.
Land is now the last and most important stronghold owned by people in Ukraine. If the existing law is changed so that land can be bought and sold in the marketplace – even without the fraudulent features now being planned – ownership eventually will pass into very few hands.
Examples of most countries with market economies show what happens when land becomes a marketed commodity. In the USA, the family farm has become almost extinct. Most land is cultivated by large agribusinesses, with hired labor, many if not most of them Mexican and other migrant workers illegally living in the country in dismal conditions.
Not much has changed since the days of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and Caesar Chavez’s struggle for labor union recognition. This is not a world of purist conservative theoreticians.
A farm worker’s life is better in Europe, especially in Germany with its strong family farm traditions, where der Bauer, large and small, always gets the country’s respect, and workers have a social safety net.
This law, opposed by most players now in the agricultural business, will give a clear upper hand for oligarchs to buy land.
Unfortunately, there is no way the European model could be transplanted to Ukraine, considering the latter’s disastrous absence of economic justice throughout its history and the contempt shown by russified petit bourgeoisie for the Ukrainian-speaking villager.
Remarkably, the absence of social conscience is also evident in the Ukrainian diaspora – relative to American issues and its preference for right-wing points of view. For diaspora sages, converting the agricultural land in Ukraine into marketed commodity has been a holy grail since the 1990s, without much thinking about possible unintended consequences.
Worldwide, large assets tend to be accumulated in very few hands. One-half of all the assets on this planet is owned by 2 percent of the world’s population. The lower one-half of the world’s population owns only 1 percent of the world’s assets (per the Financial Times, December 6, 2006). Isn’t it nice to be in the top 2 percent and not be concerned about all those slackers? But guess where most Ukrainian peasants would end up after a crafty land grab.
Perversely (or maybe not), in Ukraine under tsarist Russia, 46 percent of land was owned by peasants in 1861 – 1 year before abolition of serfdom. That number increased to 57 percent in 1913 and 65 percent in 1916. It could be that our democracy needs to do some catching up.
The now existing land ownership law in Ukraine is not all bad.
People can get income by leasing their plots to entrepreneurs, and also can work there for pay – with some bargaining power if wisely organized with other owners.
It can include profit-sharing. In contrast, the bulk of Ukraine’s big-time industrial enterprises have slipped away from ethnic Ukrainian hands.
This is not surprising. Unfettered capitalism is usually at loggerheads with the national interest of the majority of its citizens in any country.
It is worthwhile for Ukrainians to dwell on land ownership issue and not be stampeded by ideological, foolhardy, and sometimes demagogic agitation for land reform. Despite the “inefficiencies” of the existing system, Ukraine produced record harvest in recent years.
This relatively low-key issue is not attracting now much independent media attention. Not as much as the political persecution in Ukraine, the Iran politically inspired nuclear scare, or even the recent Gaitana furor.
There are also other developments that should but don’t receive enough public scrutiny, for instance the latest record-busting executive payments in the financial world, while parts of Europe and the USA are still digging out of the consequences of the years of intemperance and excesses in both the public and commercial domains.
It is the same mammon that drives the bankers and the oligarchs. It has no moral code, and bends the law wherever it can do it.
All this eventually will be dwarfed by the big bang the oligarchs are preparing with the takeover of Ukraine’s land – if it comes to pass.
It would reduce Ukraine’s rural population – the core of the Ukrainian nation – to an economical equivalent of illegal immigrant status in their own country.
Boris Danik is a retired Ukrainian-American living in North Caldwell, New Jersey.
