It finally became clear to me why our Iryna Klymenko is one
of Ukraine's leading economic journalists: she was trained in philosophy,
not economics, and thus her mind was never poisoned by what Ukraine's former
teachers of political economy all too often still teach their students.
Her column this week on Ukrainian agriculture and its ills highlights yet
another sector where Ukraine could be an economic powerhouse and remains
a pygmy because of the parasitic monopolies that pump out everything they
possibly can.
Stalinist collectivized agriculture was a sort of state feudalism, designed
to neutralize the peasants, control them, and squeeze out of them as much
as possible. In a country where things habitually are renamed in order
to pretend to be changing instead of actually doing so, the collective
agricultural enterprise preserves the dominance of formerly (and sometimes
still) Communist feudal lords over agricultural producers who get almost
nothing for their labor except food and what they can pilfer. Obviously,
the sector constantly hemorrhages state funds and benefits politically
connected monopolies. It is a sad story familiar throughout the Ukrainian
economy: the state determines who can make really serious money, and nobody,
like foreign investors who might have a different idea how to do things,
had better get in their way. As Canadian Ambassador Fraser pointed out
in his interview with us some months ago, Canada has much worse conditions
for agriculture and much higher productivity because farming is private,
and he was, of course, ignored.
Perhaps donor countries and organizations should try even harder to
use their aid as a lever to force this country to do what is clearly in
the objective interest of its own economic development, only not in the
private interests of those who use power for their own parasitic ends.
This applies especially, but by no means only, to agriculture.






