Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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ISIS Press Release 29/05/08
The Battle to Save the Polish Countryside
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/savePolishCountryside.php
Julian Rose exposes the scandal of EU’s deliberate policy to get rid of 
family farms for the benefit of the corporations and gives a personal account 
of his battle with the GMO dragon that threatens to devastate rural Poland

Poland is accustomed to fighting rearguard actions to throw off unwelcome 
invaders. Throughout the 19th century period of “The Partitians” - occupation 
by Russia and then Austria – the Poles kept in their hearts a longing for a 
day when they could be freed from the yoke of repression and find genuine 
independence. After finally succeeding in 1918 to rid themselves of the 
invaders, they were soon engulfed in conflict again, this time with the 
invading Nazi Germany. They responded with the 1939-45 resistance movement 
that sprouted up in the fields, small towns and main cities.

As many will know, the Poles fought alongside the British throughout the 
Second World War - a time when Poland’s government in exile had its head 
quarters in London. I remember quite well when I was a boy a Polish exile who 
lived in our village (Whitchurch-on-Thames) coming regularly to my family 
home and diligently cleaning the chimneys. He spoke little, but did a very 
thorough job.

It was only in 1989 that Poland finally threw off the last repressive regime 
of occupation in their land, the Russian communists. So, the last nineteen 
years of freedom have been been the longest historical period of 
non-occupation in a very long time.

The Nobel prize winning author Thomas Mann, who fled Nazi Germany before 
World War Two, was reported to have remarked just before his death in 1969 
that although the Nazis had been defeated, he feared that fascism had not: “I 
am concerned about the weak position of freedom in post world war Europe and 
North America,” he said.

We can surely identify with his concern. ‘The weak position of freedom’ is 
evident throughout our increasingly pacified Orwellian society, and has 
recently come to undermine the long standing traditions of the Polish 
countryside, particularly the independence of the peasant and family farms, 
and the huge biodiversity of the Polish countryside of which they are the 
prime trustees.

The communists failed to quell the small Polish peasant farmers into 
submission during their period of occupation, which left the Country with a 
rich, if rather confusing, legacy of approximately one and a half million 
small scale family farms (average size 18 acres) dotted around the Polish 
Provinces, but particularly prevalent in the south and east.
“The European Union is simply not interested in small farms”

When I was first invited in November 2000 by Jadwiga Lopata, founder of The 
International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside, to come to Poland 
as a co-director of this newly established non governmental organisation, the 
Country was preparing itself, or more correctly, being prepared for entry 
into the European Union. Opinions were strongly divided concerning the merits 
of such an action and those most against included the farmers.

One of our first tasks, as I saw it, was to warn the Poles just what ‘joining 
the EU’ would mean for the farming population, for rural communities and for 
the renowned biodiversity of the countryside.

Through the auspices of a senior civil servant in Warsaw, Jadwiga and I were 
able to address a meeting with the Brussels-based committee responsible for 
negotiating Poland’s agricultural terms of entry into the EU. It proved to be 
an ominous foretaste of things to come.

The first thing that struck us was the fact that out of the twelve people 
sitting in the room at the European Commission, not one was Polish. I 
explained to the attendant body that in a Country where 22 percent of the 
working population are involved in agriculture, and the majority on small 
farms, it would not be a good idea to follow the same regime as had been 
operated in the UK and other EU member countries, in which ‘restructuring’ 
agriculture had involved throwing the best farmers off the land and 
amalgamating their farms into large scale monocultural operations designed to 
supply the predatory supermarket chains. You could have heard a pin drop.

After clearing her throat and leaning slowly forward, the chair-lady said: “I 
don't think you understand what EU policy is. Our objective is to ensure that 
farmers receive the same salary parity as white collar workers in the cities. 
The only way to achieve this is by restructuring and modernising old 
fashioned Polish farms to enable them to compete with other countries 
agricultural economies and the global market. To do this it will be necessary 
to shift around one million farmers off the land and encourage them to take 
city and service industry jobs to improve their economic position. The 
remaining farms will be made competitive with their counterparts in western 
Europe.”

There in a nutshell you have the whole tragic story of the clinically 
instigated demise of European farming over the past three decades. We 
protested that with unemployment running at 20 percent how would one provide 
jobs for another million farmers dumped on the streets of Warsaw? This was 
greeted with a stony silence, eventually broken by a lady from Portugal, who 
rather quietly remarked that since Portugal joined the European Union, 60 
percent of small farmers had already left the land. “The European Union is 
simply not interested in small farms,” she said.
What happens when a nation joins the EU

A month or so later, we were invited to the Polish parliament to address the 
government’s agricultural committee. I gave a speech entitled, “Don’t Follow 
Us”, in which I explicitly warned of the fate in store for the Polish 
countryside if Poland joined the EU. I gave some vivid examples of what had 
happened in the UK over the past two decades: the ripping up of 35 000 miles 
of hedge rows; the loss of 30 percent of native farmland bird species; 98 
percent of species-rich hay meadows, thousands of tonnes of wind and water 
eroded top-soil, and around fifteen thousand farmers driven off the land 
every year, accompanied by a rapid decline in the quality of food.

That night, Respospolita, a leading national broadsheet, carried a portion of 
this speech under the intended heading “Don’t Follow Us”. The piece appeared 
in exactly half the editions, in the other half was an article praising the 
merits of Poland joining the EU. That was in the autumn of 2001.

Poland joined the EU in 2004 after an intense publicity campaign calling on 
Poles to “Say Yes to the EU!” The propaganda machine went into overdrive with 
brash promises of “pots of gold” being showered on Poland and farmers being 
offered generous agricultural subsidies and free advice, provided they played 
by the rules of the game...

That ’game’ was all too familiar to me. Spend hours out of your working day 
filling in endless forms, filing maps and measuring every last inch of your 
fields, tracks and farmsteads; applying for ‘passports’ for your cattle and 
ear tags for your sheep and pigs; re-siting the slurry pit and putting 
stainless steel and washable tiles on the dairy walls; becoming versed in 
HASAP hygiene and sanitary rules and applying them where any food processing 
was to take place; and living under the threat of convictions and fines 
should one put a finger out of place or be late in supplying some official 
details
Losing out to corporate serfdom

Throughout this time, I clearly remember the sense of losing something 
intangible beyond recall; losing something more valuable than that which was 
gained on the eventual arrival of the subsidy cheque.

What we were losing was our independence and our freedom; the slow rural way 
of life shared by traditional farming communities throughout the world. You 
cannot put a price on this immeasurably important quality. It is a deep, 
lasting and genuinely civilised expression of life.

So now the Poles, with their two million family farms (half a million of them 
bigger than the small family farms mentioned earlier), were going to be 
subjected to the same fate, and Jadwiga and I felt desperate to try and avert 
this tragedy.  An uphill struggle ensued, which involved swimming strongly 
against the tide and risking the wrath of the agribusiness and seed 
corporations who were gleefully moving-in behind the EU free trade agreements 
while a bought-out government stood aside.

What these corporations want (I use the present tense as the position remains 
the same to-day) is to get their hands on Poland’s relatively unspoiled work 
force and land resources. They want to establish themselves on Polish soil, 
acquire their capital cheaply and flog the end products of Polish labour to 
the rest of the world for a big profit.

Farmers, however, stand in the way of land acquisitions; so they are best 
removed. Corporations thus join with the EU in seeing through their common 
goals and set about intensively lobbying national government to get the right 
regulatory conditions to make their kill.

Farmers, once having fallen for the CAP subsidy carrot, suddenly find 
themselves heavily controlled by EU and national officialdom brandishing that 
most vicious of anti-entrepreneurial weapons: ‘sanitary and hygiene 
regulations’ - as enforced by national governments at the behest of the 
Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union. These are the hidden 
weapons of mass destruction of farmers and the main tool for achieving the 
CAP’s aim of ridding the countryside of small- and medium-sized family farms 
and replacing them with monocultural money-making agribusiness.

Already by 2005, 65 percent of regional milk and meat processing factories 
had been forced to close because they ‘failed’ (read couldn’t afford) to 
implement the prescribed sanitary standards. Some 70 percent of small 
slaughter houses have also suffered the same fate. Farmers increasingly have 
nowhere to go to sell their cattle, sheep, pigs and milk. Exactly as has 
happened to UK farmers, Polish farmers are now being forced out of business 
by the covert and overt destruction of the infrastructure which supports 
their profession. The rural economy thus implodes and farming communities are 
scattered to the wind. All that emerges on the green fields they have left 
behind are Tesco superstores and other hypermarket clones.

The European Union’s CAP and sanitary and hygiene weapons have been re-honed 
to slash their way through Romanian family farms -  whose extraordinary 
diversity and peasant farming skills rival Poland’s - and Turkey is next in 
line.

The so-called global food economy is in reality the instrument of a 
relatively small number of very wealthy transnational corporations. It is a 
small club that nevertheless harbours very big ambitions. One of its members 
is Monsanto (USA), whose recent marriage with the Cargill corporation makes 
it the biggest seed and agrichemical merchant in the world. Poland has been 
on the radar screen of Monsanto corporation as well as fellow seed operatives 
Dupont, Pioneer and Syngenta for some time now. However, in 2004, the same 
year that Poland joined the EU, Monsanto started a major lobbying drive on 
senior figures in the Polish government for a relaxation of national GMO 
precautionary laws and a government commitment to supporting the development 
of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) as a symbol of the modernisation of 
traditional Polish farming.
GMO-free Poland

We at ICPPC got wind of these developments and decided to devote our meagre, 
overstretched resources into fighting this new and immensely threatening 
dragon. Thus began an amazing campaign that, over the space of a year and a 
half, managed to help galvanise the boards of every province in Poland (there 
are 16) to declare themselves a ‘GMO Free Zone’, so that by September 2005 
the whole country could declare itself ‘GMO Free’.

The chair of each province wrote to the prime minister demanding national 
legislation to recognise their new status by law. At first nothing happened, 
but then, much to everyone’s surprise - and Monsanto’s fury - Jaroslaw 
Kaczynski (the then prime minister) announced that legislation would be 
passed to ban the import and sale of GMO seeds and plants in Poland. This was 
followed a little later by a similar announcement declaring that GM animal 
feed would also be banned as of 2008.

Europe and the rest of the world were amazed. Seemingly out of nowhere, a 
country passed national legislation to ban GM seeds and animal feeds, an 
illegal act in the eyes of the European Commission. Only Greece and Austria 
had come close to achieving such a ban. It seemed that Poland was to make 
history and perhaps lead the rest of Europe towards a new moratorium, if not 
outright ban, of GMO. But this fairy tale ending is yet to be.

Back at the ranch, bemused Polish farmers could hardly grasp the significance 
of this event, already deeply perplexed by the strange new world of western 
capitalism and shell shocked by the complexities and apparent two-facedness 
of the CAP, and the need to absorb the seemingly unfathomable ‘science’ and 
propaganda surrounding GMO.

Aware of this dangerously exploitable situation, we embarked on a countrywide 
awareness-raising campaign armed with the documentary film against GMO, Life 
Running out of Control, dubbed into Polish, and recorded onto CD.

We ran into considerable flack, especially wherever university professors of 
agriculture were invited to lead public debates. Often, on such occasions, 
Jadwiga and I were the only voices critical of GMO up against half a dozen 
professors armed with power point presentations and lecturing straight from 
the Monsanto manual. However, the distinctly intuitive Polish public nearly 
always came down on our side, offering much needed encouragement. It was an 
important tour in which we addressed some thirty different meetings in 
village halls, clubs, farmers institutions and Council offices.

Newspapers, television and to a lesser extent radio, were, and remain, pretty 
much gagged from reporting the truth. As we discovered, much of the Polish 
media is in foreign hands or largely held by outside interests. The GMO lobby 
had already won over the main Polish farmers union, and the new government, 
under Donald Tusk, kept an increasingly silent position on the future of the 
anti GMO legislation enacted by his predecessor Kaczynski.

Kaczynski’s team had already appeared to stall when confronted by the dual 
threat of a fine from the European Commission for instituting an ‘illegal’ 
blanket ban on GMO (under EU law no country is allowed to overstep ‘free 
trade’ dictats by outright banning of GMO) and the huge corporate backlash 
resulting from the ban.

Now that a new government with a distinctly modernising agenda was in charge, 
we were forced to work even harder in order to keep the anti GMO momentum 
alive. Faced by this denouement, we decided to help create a new national 
organisation: ‘The Coalition for a GMO Free Poland’ and to draw upon as wide 
a cross section of society as possible to promote its aims. There are now 180 
organisations and key individuals on the books and we have made some headway 
with the wary media.

Among those who have joined up are colleagues fighting another predatory US 
invader, Smithfield, the giant pig factory farming multinational (UK 
subsidiary Danish Crown, East Anglia) which moved onto Polish soil (or should 
I say concrete) in the late 1990s and, with a strong link to Monsanto’s North 
American GM soya export trade, established their perverse animal factories 
with the aid of a cheap Polish work force and corrupt government officials. 
The thousands of GM-soya fattened pigs that now flood the market have helped 
to undercut the prices and destroy the livelihood of many hundreds of already 
hard pressed traditional pig farmers throughout Poland and far beyond.

Smithfield and other industrial farming units operating out of Poland don’t 
like the idea of a GM animal feed ban (due to come into force this year) and 
have used the current high price of conventional animal feeds to put pressure 
on the government to postpone the ban to 2009 or beyond. A great opportunity 
will be lost if this postponement is agreed, and it will be harder to ensure 
that companies such as Smithfield can be prevented from further exploiting 
the market place’s demand for cheap pork.

How ironic it is that the hell bent US development of biofuels has played 
into the hands of the proponents of cheap GMO feed for meat production by 
forcing up the price of conventional feeds, such as barley based products, 
through displacing cereals from millions of acres planted with GM maize to 
produce fuel for motor-cars and trucks. Now GM soya and maize, previously 
avoided by most European animal feed importers, suddenly look like the only 
cheap option available. We have consistently lobbied for government to 
encourage farmers to grow their own traditional feed products, but in a world 
hooked on the global trade of cheap proteins, such advice has fallen on deaf 
ears.
The next Polish peasant uprising

Poland has all the potential for a full blown peasant revolt to recapture the 
right to grow, eat and trade their superb farmhouse foods; thus freeing 
themselves from the bureaucratically perverse sanitary and hygiene 
regulations imposed upon them. With one and a half million largely 
subsistence-based small family farms still in operation, it is something we 
should not rule out. But perhaps the strongest force militating against such 
an action is the fact that a fair proportion of farmers have already signed 
up to the ‘pot of gold’ held tantalisingly in front of their noses by the 
Brussels bureaucrats; that ultimately delivers just a few crumbs of financial 
support to farms of five to seven hectares, but rewards large farms with 
substantial offerings.

Money can indeed buy-out the seeds of revolution, but the heart of the 
peasants will not be appeased; neither will the hearts of caring individuals 
who know and love the working countryside. In a world where genuine 
independence is seen as a threat to the controlling influence of 
transnational and national power brokers, a watchful eye will be kept on any 
potentially rebellious leaders, and covert efforts made to ensure that 
placidity reigns supreme. But they will be up against a poisoned and polluted 
nature in rebellion, and those waking up to the stark choices that confront 
all of us: capitulate to the forces of ‘total control’ or wrest back control 
of life and work to rejuvenate your local communities to do the same.

Poland is well-versed in the art of survival. Provided the next generation of 
farm owners has the will to carry forward the traditions inherited along with 
the land, there is great hope for this proud and brave nation to come through 
the chaos with its soul and seed unspoilt.

This is an edited version of an article in the latest edition of Quarterly 
Review, a UK-based journal devoted to ideas and culture drawing upon 
penetrating socio-political insights.

Julian Rose is president of the ICPPC. Current activities of the Coalition 
include:

* Raising the Social Status of Farmers Using Work Horses - a Malopolska-based 
project highlighted by rising oil prices and the need to mitigate global 
warming by reducing CO2 emissions.

* Save Poland's Seeds - an awareness-raising campaign among farmers and 
gardeners to protect the indigenous seed base at a time of increasing 
corporate piracy, modification and ownership of native seeds.

* Opening ICPPC’s eco-centre (at ICPPC’s HQ) for educational visits by 
schools in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of renewable energy 
technologies and ecological farming.