FEUDALISM REVISITED

Hasty introduction of land mortgage during economic ruin and instability will only lead to artificially-created debts. It will be much easier later to take the land from collective, rather than private, property.

NO ONE'S PROPERTY

The Communists created huge nameless landowners, driving the meek into kolhosps (collective farms). Today they scream the word, village, but interpret it as collective farm, state farm, and vice versa.

The President said at an all-Ukrainian forum that 80% of district administration heads are agrarians. This is actually the case. In order to retain power, these agrarian officials founded the Peasant Party in Eastern Ukraine, making people frightened of democrats, and the Agrarian Party in Western and Central Ukraine to frighten people of Communists and Socialists. But both parties defend the same interests.

Their overweening interest is maintaining intact the collective ownership of land. To this end, the collective agrarians managed to have the President sign a decree On Apportioning Land Transferred into Collective Ownership, which substitutes forcible transfer of land into collective property for voluntary choice of ownership forms.

The so-called denationalization by means of dividing lands transferred into collective ownership on a large territory (in most cases, these are several populated areas) ostensibly promotes the voluntary and unrestricted development of all forms of land property. However, from now on, there can be no question of decollectivization, for the land is now neither state-owned nor collective.

Simultaneously, much tumult is being raised about treating land as a market commodity. What the agrarian nomenklatura needs is the internal (kolhosp level), rather than free, market of land. This will allow them to settle payments with hungry and cold pensioners or with recalcitrant collective farmers for the land shares they own. For a free market ruins the kolhosp system. And what are they worth without the latter?

If, for example, you have a hectare of arable land which yields 30 centners (three metric tons) of grain, this raises a question whether you must pay society for the energy of the soil, water and the sun involved in that production. This energy is our national wealth, so whoever uses it must pay a share of his profit. This tax, conditioned by soil fertility and natural and climatic variations, is what is known as primary rent.

But by demanding, ostensibly on behalf of the common people, an exemption for the clan of large landowners from paying this rent, the agrarian lobby strives to rob society as a whole. The existing negligible tax rate on Ukrainian arable and other farmland as well as selective privileges are a striking example of how income bestowed by God on all Ukrainian citizens is being appropriated.

MONOPOLY RENT IS THE GREATEST EVIL

This additional and morally unacceptable income comes about as a result of selling the produce at monopoly prices which exceed its actual cost, including labor costs, profitability, and all other rents.

To gain monopoly rent, free competition is being stifled by all means possible, and artificial obstacles are being put up to prevent other efficient commodity producers from producing and selling their items on the domestic and foreign markets. Of course, kolhosps are the main beneficiaries of this monopoly rent.

However, the nation as a whole derives no benefit from it. The agricultural market has in fact been devastated. One reason for this is that kolhosps still enjoy tremendous advantages, while private farmers own only 3% of cash-crop arable land. Calculations show that if all those working on farms and in the fields (i.e., those who actually till the land) opted out of collective farms with a land plot of their own, three fourths of the land, i.e., about 20 million hectares of cultivated land, including 18 million of arable land, would remain with the de facto land owner who does not work the land. Such landowning monopolists constitute a state within a state. Large landowners keep an unregulated and invisible market of their own and appropriate rents. This is why they need collective ownership of the land; it is why they seek negligible taxes and low rentals for shareholders.

Karl Marx once wrote of the amazing vitality of the class of large landowners. "No other social class," he wrote, "lives so extravagantly as this one and lays such claims to traditional noblesse-oblige luxury; no matter where the money comes from; no other class runs up debts so easily. But it always finds a way out thanks to the capital other people have invested in the land, which gives it a rent without any connection with incomes drawn from the land by the capitalist."

KOLHOSP SYSTEM IN ACTION

In Ukraine, this "new capitalist" is represented by the collective commodity producer or, in Party jargon, the "Communist peasant."

This is why the ordinary and not-so-ordinary kolhosp workers are so easily being assigned not only their property shares but also the kolhosp's collective debts: the ever-increasing number of the latter tie the workers to the new kolhosp for good, as if he were eternal debtors and slaves of the system. Such a slave has to do what the "majority" says at a meeting, and he will cast his ballot the way the kolhosp "majority" tells him.

This is why it is necessary to immediately begin to reform the pro-Communist agrarian system which has usurped power in the countryside and opposes the private ownership of land.

To do so, one must, first of all, give the many able and hard-working managers and experts the chance to take up private business, rather than entering the "new" ruling agro-party system.

By Oleksandr KOVALIV, chairman of the Land Reform Committee, Association of Ukrainian Farmers, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian Peasant Democratic Party, Candidate of Sciences in Economics

INCIDENTALLY

"Bringing in the harvest will be difficult this year," Borys Supikhanov, Minister of the Agro-Industrial Complex, said at a recent ministerial meeting.

He attributed the expected difficulties to the insufficient quantity of farming machines, shortage of oil products, and the condition of standing crops.

"This year, we'll have to deal with low-standing and high-standing crops, weeded lands, and lands with variably mature crops," Mr. Supikhanov said.

The condition of the crops has been assessed primarily as satisfactory and poor.

The readiness of grain-harvesting equipment averages 54.8% throughout Ukraine. In southern regions, where harvest begins earlier, readiness is lower: 42% in Mykolayiv oblast and 39% in Kherson oblast.

Agricultural enterprises had, as of June 1, 174,000 tons of light oil products, which is below normal. Experts estimate that farms should have fuel reserves of at least 200,000 tons.

Fuel requirements for June are an estimated 665,000 tons, and that for the whole harvest period is 1,433,000 tons of diesel fuel and 753,000 tons of gasoline.

Mr. Supikhanov said that the complaints of farms about the insufficient funding for equipment maintenance and repairs and inadequate fuel supplies are all too speculative. The oblasts must search for sources of funding, including those from local budgets.