Peasant Loses Faith in <I>Kolhosp</I>

Although the state of affairs at agricultural enterprises has deteriorated in the past year, the attitude of peasants toward land reform has changed for the better. This is the main conclusion we can make on the basis of the Land Reform’99 national survey conducted by the Center for Sociological Expert Examination of the Institute of Sociology on the request of the land privatization and collective farm (kolhosp) reorganization project being implemented in Ukraine by the International Financial Corporation.

80% of the respondents see the money losing nature of agricultural production as the main cause of the worsened situation in the countryside. Most peasants receive wages in kind, not in money, with this phenomenon assuming a formidable scale: while in 1998 the collective farms only paid 8% of their workers with produce, in 1999 this figure went up to 25%. To find at least a little hard cash and meet their essential needs, the peasants are more and more pinning their hopes on their private land plots whose role is noticeably increasing: in 1999, 85% of the peasants polled pointed to private plots as important sources of income (vs. 69% in 1998).

Meanwhile, the number of those who favor land reform and think that it should be speeded up, deepened, or extended, has gone up by 16% and reached 38% during the past year. Simultaneously, there are practically no people satisfied with the tempo and depth of reforms. With agriculture in crisis, fewer and fewer peasants hope for the economic revival of the kolhosps. 46% of those polled support the idea of collective farm reorganization (52% of which, twice as many as last year, are collective farmers), with 57% of the reorganized farm workers considering this step to be justified. Noteworthy is the pattern of peasant attitudes toward the idea of a market in farmland: while 1998 saw the growth in the number of those who opposed the sale of land (66%), their ranks have been reduced by 11% in 1999 (although 55% is still rather high).

Commenting on the poll results, deputy director of the Institute of Sociology Yuri Sayenko laid emphasis on the social aspects of rural reformation. In his opinion, the reform will not produce substantial results until there are shifts in public attitudes: the latter has in fact not undergone any change during independence. No wonder, the rural resident is inert, as far as reforms are concerned, for people have developed a stable unwillingness to receive any information (the poll says peasants are ill-informed about the land reform, with only 7% and 19% of the respondents knowing about it in 1998 and 1999 respectively). This is why, Mr. Sayenko thinks, economic factors alone are not enough to put rural reforms in motion: one must first learn how to persuade the people.

This year, the Land Privatization and Collective Farm Reorganization Project continues to work in Volyn and Chernihiv Oblasts, as well as in the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea. A total 66 collective farms have been reorganized in Ukraine’s four oblasts over the years of the project’s implementation.