Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [52]
† The one country that has successfully avoided migration, despite labor shortages and an aging population, is Japan. The lack of immigrants has resulted in a declining standard of living, a price Japanese leaders still say they are willing to pay. However, Japan has never had substantial immigration, so there is no existing arrival-city population to propel further demand.
4
THE URBANIZATION OF THE VILLAGE
THE VILLAGE TRAP
Tatary, Poland
When school ends each afternoon, 17-year-old Gosia Storczynski abandons her friends in a quick flurry of Polish-English slang, mounts her bicycle, and makes the four-kilometer journey to a lonely field on the edge of her village. There, she covers her auburn hair in a kerchief and meets her father, a big, grizzled man who has arrived in a horse-drawn wooden cart. She takes a 10-liter pail from the cart, heads to the center of a field, squats beneath a grazing heifer with the pail between her knees, and begins the exhausting two-hour job of milking the family herd, entirely by hand, and hauling the heavy buckets home. Each afternoon, the effort is repeated; each morning, Gosia rises at dawn for more farm chores. Hers is the life of a peasant, timeless, exhausting, governed by the rhythms of nature.
But Gosia is, as she is well aware, a member of Europe’s final generation of peasants. It is she, and several million fellow young subsistence farmers who cover the continent’s eastern flank, who will put an end to this millennia-old institution. Indeed, she is one of the westernmost members of a worldwide generation who are declaring an end to the peasant life, sooner in Europe, within decades in Asia, and almost certainly by the end of the century in Africa.*
Gosia, like peasants almost everywhere today, has found her life governed less by the fruits of farming and the market for food than by the push and pull of the arrival city. Gosia’s father, 53-year-old Marek, is the hereditary owner of these 16 hectares on the eastern edge of Poland, near the city of Białystok and the border of Belarus. That makes his farm large by local standards (and tiny almost anywhere else in Europe), but much of his land is unfarmable: Forest, meadow, and ravine account for more than half. Only seven hectares are arable, which makes this almost an average-sized Polish farm, not really large enough to provide a full income. Farms on this edge of the Western world are almost as small as those in the far more fertile wetlands of Asia: 60 percent of Poland’s farms are smaller than five hectares; more than a third are less than one hectare. This is strictly peasant farming: Over 44 percent of Poland’s farms produce solely or mainly for their own consumption, and another 10 percent produce nothing at all.1 Poland’s four million farmers are the largest remaining peasant population in Europe. They do have the advantage, vis-à-vis their fellow peasants in the post-communist East and in China, of being clear and outright owners of their land: During the communist era, Poland collectivized only its largest farms, leaving 80 percent of the land in the hands of small-hold peasants.
Poland’s peasant farms are an enormously ineffective way to use farmland. Despite employing almost a fifth of the population, agriculture accounts for only 4.7 percent of Poland’s economy—and almost all of this comes from only 5 percent of the farms, the largest ones. It is a waste of economic opportunity: Paid agricultural labor accounts for only 3 percent of Poland’s rural workforce, a fifth of which is unemployed. Productive commercial agriculture would employ far more. And it is a huge waste of land. Average European farms produce almost five times as much food per hectare as Polish farms do.2
As with much of the world’s peasant agriculture, the Storczynski farm is economically unsustainable.