Hasty Implementation of Presidential Decree Exacerbates Social Tensions
Reorganization of collective farms into private businesses has been completed in Ukraine, Deputy Minister for Agricultural Policy Roman Shmidt has announced recently. “The collective system of farming no longer exists and has no legal framework whatsoever,” he said emphasizing that this step completes the first stage of reforms stipulated by the presidential decree On Urgent Measures to Speed Up Reform in Agriculture.
According to Mr. Shmidt, of 10,521 collective farms 11,169 various agricultural businesses have been created, including individual farms (6%), farming societies (45%), private land-leasing companies (22%), farming cooperatives (25%), and farms of other forms of ownership (2%). The next stage of reform, he adds, will be the creation of the infrastructure for a land market. For this purpose the government has drawn up a number of bills on real estate registration, mortgage, and financial operations with realty. The bills have been submitted to Verkhovna Rada.
Meanwhile, the reforms underway in the rural sector have sparked quite a controversy among the population. Thus, 35% of the polled disapprove of a quicker pace for reforms, while 33% speak in of speeding things up, Interfax Ukraine reports, referring to the poll conducted by the Socis Center for Social and Marketing Studies. Nearly half of respondents from rural areas (48%) disapprove of the reforms, with only a quarter supporting the restructuring of the collective farms. The results of the poll indicate that the peasants’ disapproval can be ascribed to fear of the possible social consequences of the reform.
Over one-third of the polled (almost a half of rural respondents) believe that the dividing up the collective farms will not stimulate agricultural production. Only one out of five expects positive results from dividing the land, with only 16% sure of its immediate success (8% in rural areas).
The results of the poll tally with the experts’ opinion. The hasty implementation of the presidential decree has caused increased social tensions in rural areas, the head of the department of social and agricultural policies at the Institute of Agricultural Economy, Yuri Yurchyshyn, maintains. “The overwhelming majority of farmers have no idea of what is really happening, they are just going with the flow. That is why we might not be getting the expected results,” he told a round table on reforms in agriculture.
Academician of the National Academy of Science and head of a department in the Institute of Economics Oleksiy Onyshchenko, thinks that reforms are not always implemented in accordance with democratic standards but under pressure from those on top. Serhiy Demyanenko who is in charge of the economic part of the land partition project says the stumbling block to reform is the lack of rural leaders who are genuinely interested in carrying out reforms as in Poland and the Baltic states.
