Take agriculture, for example. The breadbasket of Europe, nay the world, needs help to make an even greater contributions to this critical sector. This provides an opportunity as well as a challenge.
Some 84 percent of Ukraine’s agricultural land is owned by small and medium sized landowners. Much of this is due to the break up of huge kolhosps– mega collective farms– of the former USSR. Their common ownership, corruption and mismanagement made them virtually unproductive while the small plots of land sustained Ukraine’s agricultural sector and, more importantly, fed the population.
Now foreign ownership of the land, which to date has been a no, no and a good thing given the grab of most of Ukraine’s other sectors by unscrupulous oligarchs, may be coming. The aim is to generate foreign investment and larger scale efficiencies. But what of the small farmers who depend on the land for food and a modicum of income? How to protect them from unscrupulous land-grabs and dislocation?
Ukraine’s government needs the utmost vigilance to ensure that its best intended policies designed to make Ukraine the global agricultural leader do no play havoc with its agrarian population dependent on small farms.
Things are moving quickly. Already some 20 percent of the land is in foreign hands via land-lease agreements. Land concentration can balloon without proper laws and policies.
Things are moving quickly. Recently, International Trade Minister Ed Fast and Agriculture Minister Oleksiy Pavlenko, met to discuss Canada-Ukraine trade matters. Canada’s Quebec companies already received some $50 million from the government of Canada for agricultural headway in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the Embassy of Israel in Canada announced that both countries will assist Ukraine’s small and medium farms via the Ukraine Horticulture Business Development Project. Canada is contributing nearly $20 million. Israel’s contribution is the “provision of world leading technical training in agriculture.”
The project is implemented by the Mennonite Economic Development Associates of Canada. The Mennonites have been present in Ukraine since Catherine the Great, the German queen, deeded them land after destroying Zaporizya, the military fortress and seat of Ukraine’s political power. According to the Embassy’s letter, Christian Paradis, then Canada’s Minister
of International Development and La Francophonie, believes that “Our support for this project, in collaboration with the Government of Israel, will help Ukrainians farmers and small and medium-sized businesses move from poverty to prosperity.”
Israel’s Ambassador to Canada calls this move significant to Canada-Israel bilateral ties and “another example of how Canada and Israel can leverage mutual expertise to help make the world a better place.”
When asked why Ukraine, an agricultural powerhouse, would seek a sharing of “experiences in growing, storage and marketing of agricultural products as well as teaching best practices…for small and medium farmers in Zaporizhya, Mikolayev, Odessa, Kherson” from others, Canada’s official answer: “there are still significant opportunities to increase yields” in the small and medium farms that “still produce most of Ukraine’s dairy products as well as large amounts of cereal and horticulture crops.”
Indeed, small agrarian operations could benefit from modern technologies, better access to finance, and underdeveloped links to markets. The danger lurks in unintended consequences of such progress; high-end investors concentrating ownership, unscrupulous mercenaries buying out farmlands for a pittance from economically hard-pressed owners.
Ukraine has good reason to be cautious. Ukraine lost some 10 million landowners to a Communist-made famine as the Kremlin’s Commissar responsible for the task, Lazar Kaganovych was more interested in its land than its people. Similarly, the Nazi Reichskommissar for Ukraine Erich Koch declared that Germany did not need Ukrainians only their land. In fact, train-loads of the black earth were moved there during the war. History teaches that it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Donor countries, like Canada, need to ensure that greed does not turn well-intended contributions into social injustice. This means building into agricultural projects an understanding of social conditions and ways to address them. Agricultural land is one of the few possessions left in the hands of Ukrainians as oligarchs and criminals have amassed most of the country’s other assets.
Canada’s deep friendship for Ukraine is motivated, in part, by the gargantuan efforts of Canadians of Ukrainian decent whose turned its western provinces into an agricultural powerhouse in the last century. Now, Canada can reciprocate by establishing an oversight program to ensure that the dastardly agrarian history in Ukraine does not repeat itself.
An agrarian governance institution in Ukraine created to ensure a win-win relationship between foreign investment and the well being of small and medium farmers might be a way to do this.
Oksana Bashuk Hepburn, formerly a senior policy advisor for the government of Canada, is an opinion writer.
