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[Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>]

Europe’s Tragic Breadbasket Braces for New Fight for Black Soil - BNN
Bloomberg
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/europe-s-tragic-breadbasket-braces-for-new-fight-for-black-soil-1.1363640

Europe’s Tragic Breadbasket Braces for New Fight for Black Soil

Volodymyr Verbyany, Bloomberg News

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(Bloomberg) -- Tamara Tarasenko’s life began against the backdrop of the
violent struggles for land in Ukraine, known as “the breadbasket of
Europe.” Now she’s 80, and she’s afraid there’s another fight coming for
its fertile black soil.

Born between the Josef Stalin-imposed famine that killed millions of people
in the 1930s and the invasion of Nazis who murdered millions more to
exploit the land for Germany, she spent most of her life on a kolgosp, a
collective farm created from land seized by the communists.

After Ukraine broke with the Soviet Union in 1991, she and her husband got
six hectares that helped keep them afloat during the country’s tumultuous
effort to transform itself into a market economy. And like all owners of
farmland in Ukraine, she wasn’t able to sell it.

Until now. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a former comic who swept to power
on a pledge to crack down on corruption and revive Ukraine’s sputtering
economy, is about to scrap a 2001 rule that banned sales to prevent people
from being strong-armed or swindled out of their property.

His government says it can boost the economy by as much as 2% annually for
the next five years by attracting badly needed investment and know-how and
improve living standards. But most Ukrainians -- almost three quarters,
according to opinion polls -- think it’s a terrible idea.

“I’m very much against it,” said Tarasenko, who lives off of a pension of
less than $100 a month and fears she’ll be cheated out of her holdings in
the village of Blystavytsya, 25 miles northwest of Kyiv. “Who would take
care of me?”

Zelenskiy’s Gamble

In a country with a potential arable-land market of 40 million hectares, an
area almost the size of California, the concern is real. Endemic graft and
memories of the wheeler-dealing privatizations of the 1990s -- in which the
nation’s all-powerful oligarchs snatched control of large swathes of the
economy -- have left many landowners worried.

Zelenskiy’s opponents have also stoked concern that cash-flush foreigners
will eventually be able to snap up one of Ukraine’s most-valuable
resources, leaving many of the country’s 41 million people forced to work
for others on the soil they once owned. That has led to public protests and
at least one brawl in parliament.

The plan poses what is potentially the biggest risk yet for Zelenskiy,
whose pledges to curb corruption and end the Kremlin-backed war in eastern
Ukraine boosted his popularity to above 60% this fall. But his doubling
down on lifting the ban has hit his popularity.

Spurred on by demands from western donors, including the International
Monetary Fund, his government is pushing to cancel the moratorium from next
October. While his party has a large majority, only 24O of parliament’s 450
lawmakers backed an initial reading of a bill allowing the sale of farmland
to Ukrainians, with limits on how much one person or company can own.

They’ll discuss it again and may vote on a final version as early as this
week.

The idea is that opening the market can prompt a tectonic shift in banking
and agriculture and propel an industry that makes up over 10% of Ukraine’s
economic output. It’s also aimed at providing collateral and easier access
to loans for landowners, many of whom still use livestock, hand tools and
dilapidated tractors to work the fields.

“It’s a litmus test that shows Zelenskiy’s readiness for unpopular
decisions,” said Volodymyr Fesenko, the head of the Penta research
institute in Kyiv.

Olena Perevoznyk, a 44-year-old icon painter who inherited several small
plots from her grandmother, is looking forward to change. The ban stopped
her from selling the plots to repay a mortgage a decade ago, and she now
rents them out for about $70 a year. As the opening of the market looms,
she’s increasingly thinking about starting a goat farm.

“It’s my long-time dream,” said Perevoznyk, who lives in the town of
Brovary near Kyiv. “I’ll probably need to sell my separate plots and buy
one parcel.”

If the government doesn’t manage to create a market, its goal of boosting
the economy by 40% in the next five years would be hard to achieve, said
Oleg Nivievskyi, an assistant professor at the Kyiv School of Economy.

Foreigner Question

The biggest question is whether the reform will eventually allow sales to
foreigners. That may be a tough sell in a country once considered by the
Nazis as a target for “Lebensraum,” a place for Germans to take for their
own.

“The Nazi Lebensraum was, above all, Ukraine. Its fertile soil was to be
cleared of Soviet power and exploited for Germany,” Timothy Snyder, a
history professor at Yale University who has extensively studied eastern
Europe, wrote in the New Republic in 2014. “German planners expected that
some 30 million inhabitants of the Soviet Union would starve to death.”

The Soviets, whose imposition of collective farms and confiscation of food
caused a 1932-1933 famine that killed millions of Ukrainians -- the exact
number is unknown -- spent decades after World War II warning that the
“chornozem” black soil was at risk of being exploited by the West.

While the government bill approved in the first reading banned sales to
foreigners until 2024 -- with Russians permanently excluded -- Oleksiy
Mushak, an adviser to the prime minister, said Monday that parliament may
agree to prohibit sales to foreigners until Ukraine holds a referendum.
Zelenskiy is pushing for a vote to solve the question for good.

In other former communist countries that are now in the European Union,
concerns that foreigners would buy up land proved baseless. But that
doesn’t convince people like Fedir Bohdan, a 63-year-old landowner from the
village of Mykhaylivka.

“Investors from the Middle East and Asia have crazy amounts of money, and
farmland resources are limited there,” he said during a protest in Kyiv
against the law. “Will businessmen from countries like China hire locals?
No, they’ll hire their countrymen. And we will lose our work and money.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Volodymyr Verbyany in Kiev at
vverbyany1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Winfrey at
mwinfrey@bloomberg.net, ;Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net, ;Andrea Dudik
at adudik@bloomberg.net, Andrew Langley


-- 
Lawrence F. London, Jr.
lfljvenaura@gmail.com
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