• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1700 0

Two hectares are used to graze the cows; the remaining five grow wheat, oats, and barley to feed the family and the cows; there is also a family vegetable patch. The milk, despite all the effort, earns payments of only about 800 zloty ($280) a month. After expenses, notably fertilizer, Marek pockets less than half of this. It’s not enough to live on, even when added to his subsidies from the Polish government and the European Union, which together give him about 400 zloty ($140) per hectare farmed each year. But he receives a far larger income from his oldest daughter, Magda, 23, who is studying nursing in Warsaw and sends money back from her part-time work. Without these urban contributions, the family would have to abandon the farm. Indeed, they plan to do so—as soon as Marek is old enough to begin receiving his government pension, which has been the sole purpose of maintaining this farm since the 1990s.

“All I want is to get my pension, then the girls will wrap it up,” Marek told me as he and his daughter hauled the sloshing milk pails to the wooden cart. “If you want to succeed in agriculture you need a big farm, and this isn’t it. I’m 53, so I’ve got seven years left, and that’s it. Everybody here is waiting for their pension. That’s the future: People have to leave. I don’t want my daughters living in Poland, after my family’s been here forever. It’s time to leave.”

But for now they, along with four million other Polish peasants, are caught in a carefully maintained equilibrium that prevents them from moving off the land. The system of pensions and payments has managed to keep Poland’s small farms from congealing into commercially viable enterprises—and, until the great explosion of westward migration in 2004, it prevented those four million peasants from giving up farming and moving to the city. Poland has pursued an expensive rural policy designed to prevent movement to the arrival city.

Poland’s anti-urban effort was launched shortly after the collapse of communism in 1990. At its heart is a pension system, the Farmers’ Social Security Fund, known by its acronym, KRUS. Like many agricultural-support programs across the developing world, the KRUS is grounded politically in a romantic attachment to the ideal of family farming and the aesthetics of the farm, and economically in a hard-nosed desire to prevent cities from being swarmed with migrants. In Poland and many other societies, beginning with post-revolutionary France and continuing in places like India today, the maintenance of the peasantry has been a substitute for a larger vision of social progress.

During its awkward post-communist transition decade, Poland’s peasant population actually increased by 5 percent in a stunning wave of urban-to-rural migration. Before 1989, the cities had been packed with state-owned factories that produced goods with no market and little economic role, except to keep a restive people employed and away from Solidarity protests. As government debt, hyperinflation, and the end of communism forced the state to close those factories, hundreds of thousands of people fled to their ancestral villages to seek the security of an agricultural pension.

During a decade when two-thirds of Poland’s three million unemployed were living in urban areas and there were severe housing shortages in Warsaw, this return to the village seemed wise. The KRUS was, in this sense, a shrewd program: It gave Poland some of the social protections of a full-fledged welfare state, without the high fiscal price of covering the full cost of living. Because the peasant farm itself provided some of the recipient’s basic food needs and made rent subsidies unnecessary, Poland could keep its transition-shocked population at bay at reasonable cost.

The KRUS is available to men at age 60, if they have worked at least 30 years on the farm and agree upon retirement to give away all land except the one hectare surrounding their house—although the land can be, and almost always is, transferred to an immediate family member, so the farms rarely get consolidated into