Agriculture in Serbia

Fear of Hunger

The question is not any more whether farmers, themselves brought to poverty and to the verge of endurance, can feed ten million or more hungry people, but whether they will manage to keep away hunger from their own doorstep!

AIM Podgorica, 17 September, 1999 (By AIM correspondent from Belgrade)

In one of the few interviews given to Western media at the time when Serbia had almost become part of the big world, Slobodan Milosevic said that his country had so much food that it could endure the sanctions for at least one thousand years! The then president of Serbia was not far from the truth: in the early days of the embargo, agriculture was still capable of standing on its own feet, although the state was very stingy when it was concerned. One fifth of the Serbian population which is engaged in food production, silently agreed to bear the burden of all the troubles the regime has drawn the country into in the past decade. The regime, like a good psychologist, knew that the farmers' patriotism was resting on two simple but strong pillars: the century-long attachment to the land which they cannot let go to waste and farmers' traditional loyalty to leaders. Along with pensioners (one million two hundred fifty thousand of them), peasants were that part of the electorate the regime could count on with certainty.

It seemed that this gold mine for keeping social peace, along with the attachment between the regime and the village, would never go dry. It seemed that the president had not exaggerated in his optimistic presentation of Serbian self-sufficiency. Nevertheless, certain notorious facts were disregarded. In eight years, the agriculture has endured three wars in its immediate neighbourhood (although their sons were called-up, farmers have almost started to believe that "Serbia has not participated in the wars") and one on its own territory. Not raising until recently the question of the state persistently cheating them, of giving them for their sold crop worthless paper or money with such delay that inflation erodes all its value, the peasants have finally, like everybody else in Serbia, realised that they have come to the end of the road!

Nowadays, the question is not any more whether they can feed about ten million of more or less hungry people in Serbia (and another million of refugees), but whether they can feed themselves and their families!. Even the farmers are afraid of hunger!

Why? It is not hard to answer this question, because apart from those employed in municipal services, beer brewers and farmers, hardly anybody is doing anything or has anything to do. But, at the same time, everybody has the understandable, one might almost say the given to them by God, need to survive: equally those who are still fortunate to work but earn on the average about fifty German marks a month, those whose miserable income arrives with an enormous delay (pensioners, teachers and majorty of workers in factories which still operate), equally as the ailing, children and young mothers who the state owes allowances for at least a year! Serbian farmers who have finally realised that sanctions are not an advantage as the regime has tried to persuade them to believe (allegedly with the explanation that they had no competition, moreover that they had the power of monopolists), but a terrible punishment, similarly like the urban population in Serbia, are short of milk, edible oil, sugar, meat, animal feed and other commodities important for everyday life.

How and why has Serbian agriculture been brought to the verge of total ruin and endurance, it is not at all hard to explain. Back at the time of Tito and communists, it had become customary to use agriculture as a well from which everybody just takes but never puts anything in. Their successor, Serbian Socialists have improved this practice to perfection. They wooed the farmers, but left them without money - either for investing into development or for the crop they sold to the state. On the other hand, by letting the "rascals in their own ranks", skilled for privatisation "under the counter", squander the socially owned agricultural estates and even a giant such as the Belgrade agricultural complex (which used to feed the capital and a big part of Serbia) sink into peverty, the state cut the bough it was standing on. Since the so-called socially owned sector the Communists were proud of and the Socialists who came after them supported, practically does not exist any more - the state has only farmers to rely on, although it has persistently tried to drive them out of the business of food production. Although it badly needs food, Serbian regime is still treating farmers like in Lenin's time: it believes that they still have two souls and that they are good for nothing else but to pay taxes and send their sons to the army!

In the meantime, Voivodina, the granary which is with very good reason claimed to be able to feed half of Europe if it were just partly stimulated like agriculture in the West, was also ruined. But, contrary to the farmers in Serbia proper, who have no habit to rebel, farmers in Voivodina, angry with the state for wanting to take their wheat for next to nothing and for paying them when money loses its value, showed this summer that they do not agree to be cheated any more. Instead of the expected purchase of at least one million tons of wheat, farmers from Voivodina (who are usually the main suppliers of wheat for bread of the state) delivered hardly hundred thousand tons! Seven hundred million dinars the National Bank of Yugoslavia somehow managed to raise to supply the people with bread (the low price of which is still playing the role of the successful guardian of socialism) can be spent on the election campaign of the ruling coalition, but certainly will not be invested in agriculture. The episode with the wheat probably would not have been so important if it had not additionally intensified the already spread fear of hunger.

The foundation which the defence against the sanctions relied on and the allegation about "food for at least one thousand years" is completely undermined. This is primarily confirmed by a sharp decline of agricultural production which can already be anticipated by numerous shortages. There are no precise official data, as the regime is still praising the success of farmers in its state media.

Now when food is needed the most, it has become the scarcest. Long sanctions, cynically low investments into agriculture, shortage of mineral fertilisers and pesticides and insecticides, lack of fuel, cheating of farmers and cattle breeders, and this summer the extremely unfavourably climate, left very serious traces on the production of foodstuffs and their manufacturers. In the green market there is still a good offer of fruit and vegetables, but the sale is very low because of very high prices (caused by the shortage of fuel) and impoverished population. Floods and then drought cut the crop this of all years into half. Shortage of meat is already in sight because due to circumstances farmers nowadays rarely make up their minds to raise cattle.

The impoverished and for a long time already pushed to the margins of state care, on the threshold of the 21st century Serbian villages are living like in the Middle Ages: majority of them, even those close to cities, have neither waterworks nor sewage! Food production is left over to the elderly people and obsolete machinery majority of which are about twenty years old. There can be no place for optimism. There is just enough of it to intensify fear of hunger.

Biserka Matic

(AIM)