#11
In These Times
November 11, 2002
This Land Is My Land; Russian farmers oppose private ownership
By Fred Weir
TOLPAKI, RUSSIA

When Russia's parliament passed a revolutionary law last summer legalizing the sale and purchase of farmland for the first time since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, many of Russia's tiny number of struggling family farmers weren't cheering. In fact, those the measure was ostensibly intended to help say private ownership of land will destroy them.

"This law will benefit only a few rich oligarchs, because they're the only ones in this country who have any cash," says Alexander Poprov, who has built a successful private farm on land leased from a failed Soviet-era collective. "Ownership is an empty symbol. What's important is who possesses the land and how he uses it. Just because someone can afford to buy land, it doesn't make him a farmer." Private property in land has been the subject of the country's toughest post-Soviet political struggle, and one which may be far from over. Private ownership of agricultural land has existed, at least in theory, since former President Boris Yeltsin handed over control of almost all Russia's arable land -- 400 million hectares -- to the members of state and collective farms a decade ago. But they have not been permitted to buy or sell the land until now.

Polls show at least half of Russians oppose private ownership of land, and a majority of collective farmers, who still control three-fourths of Russia's arable land, are dead set against the idea. The Communists had threatened to force a national referendum to revoke the law, one experts believed they could win, but the pro-Kremlin Duma passed a special law in September blocking such referenda. "Land is an emotional issue for most Russians," says Ivan Klimov of the Public Opinion Foundation in Moscow. "They don't think of it as a commodity, but as the foundation of national power and wealth."

The new law, which comes into effect on January 1, 2003, was intended to bring about an agricultural revolution in Russia by enabling outside investors to purchase land and create big, efficient capitalist agribusinesses. But there are two remaining obstacles. One is the approximately 30 million Russians who still live on the land, many of whom own shares in their former collective and state farms. The second is the private farmers, most of whom have built their businesses over the past decade by the entrepreneur's textbook: leasing collective farm fields, painstakingly improving the land and scrimping to purchase new machinery.

Poprov, a former helicopter pilot, will lose his business if the land he works on is sold. "The collective farmers who hold the title to this land may now find it much more attractive to sell it," he says. "I have no money. I put all my profits back into operations. Everything I've built will be lost if I can't get access to land."

Russia has no developed banking system, nor does the government have any planned program for providing farmers with cheap credits to purchase land. "Some oligarch will come in here, buy up all the land and offer to make me his serf," Poprov says. "I'll say no thanks, and I'll be back in the street with nothing again."

The Kremlin introduced a last-minute amendment to the law banning foreigners from purchasing Russian farmlands, ostensibly to appease the Communists. Many experts believe the change was really aimed at preventing Chinese entrepreneurs from buying into the vast and largely deserted expanses of Siberia.

Since the Soviet Union's collapse, many efforts to promote private farming have foundered on a lack of resources. With few paved roads, storage facilities or processing industries in rural areas, as much as 40 percent of collective farm produce is still wasted between field and shop counter. Add to that Russia's short growing season, finicky climate and poor soils, and "Farming in Russia is not for the faint at heart," says Anatoly Kibeka, a former professor who now runs his own private farm.

But for many, the collective farms represent not just the past, but the only existing anchor of stability and source of income in a rural wilderness of hopelessness and poverty. Under the new law, poor collective farmers, without the money to start their own farms, may be compelled to sell their shares to speculators. "Look what happened in the '90s -- all Russia's industries and resources were grabbed by a few rich oligarchs," says Yury Savinok, an official of the conservative Agrarian Party, whose electoral base is collective farmers. "Does anyone doubt the same will happen when land goes on the block? Ordinary Russians will be dispossessed again."

Indeed, "just about everything in Russia has been privatized already, except land," says Andrei Ryabov, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment in Moscow. "It is big business that lobbied for this law."

Even liberals, who support an open market in land, say the law might end up compounding the problems in Russia's deeply depressed and tradition-bound countryside. "You shouldn't confuse this law with comprehensive land reform," says Yevgenia Serova of the liberal Institute for the Economy in Transition. "Russia needs to take careful steps that will gradually put land into the hands of those who can use it most efficiently. This law might well have the opposite effect."

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