Communists Again Propose Taking Land From Peasants
At their October 30 press conference, representatives of the Communist fraction in parliament tried to convince the public that Verkhovna Rada violated its rules when enacting the Land Code in its second reading. This time the Communists, who had disrupted normal voting procedure on the bill in the parliament, augmented their traditional refrain about rules violations and rigging voting results with a new refrain, the alleged inconsistency of the Land Code with the Constitution.
It surprisingly turned out that leftist deputies “were in no way opposed to the adoption of the Land Code.” On the contrary, they said, they were fully aware of the need to adopt it. But the problem was that the code violates the Constitution, Oleksandr Tkachenko claims, as it offers no definitions of such terms as private ownership on land, land parcel, land survey, etc. Going by the interpretation of the land law by the Communists, the leasing of land must be banned, let alone private ownership. Recall that 11.2 million Ukrainians had already privatized their land sites by October 1, 2001. “The Constitution includes only one provision: the land is public property,” Mr. Tkachenko told The Day. In general, it would be very frustrating just to imagine how our agricultural sector would look once brought into full conformity with Tkachenko’s interpretation of the Constitution.
Moreover, Mr. Symonenko declared that, not only will the new Land Code fail to phase out the shadow land market, but it will also indicate that Verkhovna Rada has legalized illegal land privatization (according to the Ukrainian Association of Farmers, one million hectares of land were privatized last year — Author). It was quite difficult to grasp the point the Communist leader wanted to make, but most probably he meant large farms. As Chair of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Agrarian Policy Kateryna Vashchuk told The Day, “this land is used by big farms under the terms of long-term leases, not as their property.”
But there is also another side to the issue. Ukrainian farmers have repeatedly said that our banks, let alone foreign investors, turn their back on small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises. One can only sympathize with creditors loath to invest their money in high-risk farming businesses, with just the word of honor from credit recipients as a guarantee of repayment. Quite a different approach to investing in the agricultural sector (but, in fact, no big departure from the old Soviet one) was proposed by the Communist chieftain Symonenko, “All loans to the farming sector should be extended by the state. When credit policy was handled this way (could he mean under the Soviets? — Author) the efficiency of agriculture was higher.”
Another argument against the code’s enactment is the present state of the rural community, the Communists argue. “The stratification of society according to property and the new Land Code’s making it legal to sell land will lead to mounting social tensions and unforeseeable consequences for our society,” Symonenko said.
Following which, he contradicted himself, positively assessed the model whereby Ukrainian farmers, using their land shares, will be able to join forces with other farmers to cultivate land, creating various types of cooperatives. This theme was further expounded by Oleksandr Tkachenko. Stating that to date over 22.4 million hectares of land are owned by farmers, he said, “At present the bulk of this land is leased out at UAH 70 per hectare, with annual proceeds from this land amounting to UAH 2500-3000 per hectare” (He ought to know: his Land and People Cooperative cost Ukraine how many tens of millions of dollars a few years back? — Ed.).
Summing up, the serious, not to say grave, shortcomings of this semi-finished reform are evident. To enable farmers to get a good price for their leased land, we need a civilized land market. Caught by their crowd-pleasing rhetoric, the Communists are obviously selling short the commonsense of Ukrainian plowmen, many of whom are well aware of the moral and economic benefits of being masters on their own land, rather than to go on abiding by the instructions from Communist Party district committees on what to plant, when, and where.
Addressing a press conference in Mariupol on November 2, President Leonid Kuchma said that he intended to sign the Land Code into law. “I am going to send it to the parliament with a proposal to remove some shortcomings,” he declared. He added that he opposed the Land Code provision that allows land to be sold from 2005 on. According to the president, further procrastination of land sale “plays into the hands of those who come out against” the purchase and sale of land.
Mr. Kuchma also criticized the behavior of Communists during the Land Code vote. “You cannot turn back the clock of history because we know what kind of history we had,” he said, expressing “gratitude to the sound-minded forces in parliament” which, despite “an all-out effort of the Left factions to obstruct the Land Code vote... decided to work constructively.”
