A Bumper Crop of Problems

By Pico Iyer

Punished on all sides, farmers reap nothing but trouble

Jozef Prystupa, who raises chickens in Poland's northern district of Borkowo, sold almost 80,000 broilers to the state in 1981. Last year, thanks to a grain shortage caused by U.S. sanctions against his homeland, he shipped none. Likewise rendered fodderless, Jerzy Karczmarczyk was first reduced to keeping pigs in his chicken house and is now girding himself for an anticipated tax crunch: the government has already assessed one of his acquaintances more than $250,000 in retroactive tax payments for allegedly producing more than he declared. Yet boycotts from abroad and crackdowns at home are only part of the Polish farmer's woes this year. Last spring the expected profits from a long-overdue bumper crop of potatoes were nibbled away by an invasion of Colorado beetles; then a lingering summer dry spell withered some crops before they could be harvested. Warns Jan Kiedrowski, who switched from cattle raising to the more profitable line of cabbage growing: "If this keeps up, there's going to be serious hunger in Poland in the next few years."

Prystupa, Karczmarczyk and Kiedrowski are, ironically, among the most prosperous of the nation's 4 million private farmers, members of a select group who were chosen by the government to meet with the participants in a TIME Newstour to Eastern Europe in October 1981. At that time, Rural Solidarity was in full bloom, state subsidies were pumping up already hefty profits, and agricultural machinery and grain from the West were flooding in at record rates. Less than two months after the TIME visit, the government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law. Solidarity was banned, U.S. sanctions went into effect, and the agricultural boom died. Within a year, Poland's poultry production plummeted by 66%. The government also cut back subsidies to collective farms, effectively presenting them with a "profit or perish" ultimatum. Most recently there have been hints that the Jaruzelski regime will levy heavier property taxes and new retroactive taxes on private farmers. Since the level of those taxes may be based on productivity, self-employed farmers, who account for 75% of the nation's food production, see every reason to curtail their output; some indeed have already taken to slaughtering pigs and cattle. Thus a nation in which food shortages triggered rioting in 1956 is again on the brink of agricultural crisis.

"When I was a student," says Kiedrowski, "I heard how everything [in farming] goes smoothly. All you have to do is follow nature. It's not true. Nowadays you have to be a businessman to run a farm." Disenchantment has also come for Stanislaw Szur, a former engineering student who took over a 63-acre farm from his father-in-law last year. "It's no fun to run a farm now. Both my wife and I get up at 5 a.m. and work until 10 p.m. I go to milk the cows, and she goes to town to stand in line at the shops." At that, Szur is luckier than most. Friends with powerful connections helped him get a corn shucker; he knows of 80 other farmers who are on the waiting list for those machines in a region that is to receive only four during the next two years.

It is not surprising, then, that Polish farmers have little faith in what they derisively call "those people down in Warsaw." The government, they feel, refuses to adjust to the fact that farming requires long-term planning. In addition, the "rural brigades," groups of soldiers who occasionally visited farmers during the martial law period to remind them of the government's good intentions, hardly inspired confidence. Scoffs Szur: "They knew less about farming than my two-year-old daughter. They pretended to be interested in me, but they really wanted to hear about my political views." Farmer Jan Skrzypkowski was spared such visits only, he suspects, because his are the kind of views that the brigades did not wish to hear: "There's big talk in the press about raising the cultural standards of rural people. But we're farmers. We don't need ballet. First they should raise the economic standards. Politics," he concludes, "can't do anything for me."

Norbert Golunski, who runs an 85-acre farm and is $10,000 in debt, might be expected to share that skepticism. But as the former chairman of the regional unit of Rural Solidarity, he is convinced that political means can serve practical ends. "We have to be involved in politics," he explains. "We want economic improvements--that's politics. We want better working conditions--that's politics." What he does not talk about is the widely held suspicion that in northern Poland, Rural Solidarity, having been infiltrated by government agents, delayed farmers' efforts to organize union activities.

Many farmers make up in resourcefulness what they lack in resources. Karczmarczyk, for example, keeps several dozen carp in his water tank and uses the fishbones, scales and innards to help sustain his chickens. He also enjoys some well-placed influence: since his late father was said to be friendly with Jaruzelski, Karczmarczyk has managed to wheedle more feed out of the government than most of his colleagues do. He can therefore afford to be relatively stoical. His wife may think of Reagan as a "chicken killer," but the farmer maintains that "Reagan has taught us to think. For years we allowed ourselves to depend on the West to feed ourselves."

Wladyslaw Wicki, who has spent 56 of his 74 years on the farm, similarly dismisses current complaints by recalling the discomforts he endured between two world wars. That may be small consolation to his fellows as Poland's economic prospects grow darker and darker. Soon after Pope John Paul II's visit in June, it was reported that the Polish church was negotiating with the government to funnel about $2 billion into providing farms with machinery, seeds, fertilizer and other needed goods. Most of the farmers in Borkowo are either unaware or skeptical of the offer. The only thing they are sure of is that the best response to hardship is hard work. "On the farm," says Golunski, "we work only 360 days a year. The rest goes to vacation." --By Pico Iyer. Reported by John Moody/Warsaw

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