Many, many moons ago we had a family business making animal feed. From our dusty old mill in Lancaster we sent over 100,000 tonnes a year of cattle and sheep feed to all corners of Northern Britain. The job entailed many hours of standing in freezing farmyards passing the time of day with farmers and trying to persuade them to buy something.
In hindsight it was character building.
Over recent weeks my mind has been taken back to one
particular encounter on a farm on the outskirts of Leeds.
It was a huge enterprise. They milked over three hundred cows, reared pigs and
collected the eggs from 30,000 chickens. More impressively still, they were
marketing a high percentage of their produce themselves. Every day their milk
floats headed out into the city bearing a selection of their wares. There was
no chance in a million years that I was about to get an order from the old boy
who was running the show. He had his suppliers screwed down to the floor and to
trade with him would have been much akin to setting handfuls of ten pound notes
alight.
But I vividly remember our farmyard chat.
He told me that he was just back from a two week trip to Kiev. This was pretty
astonishing. It was hard to picture this particular red faced, flat capped
Yorkshireman choosing the Ukraine
as a holiday destination. In fact it was pretty hard to imagine him taking a
holiday anywhere. He wasn’t the taking a holiday kind of a guy.
He soon put me right.
“I wasn’t on bloody holiday. In Kiev? Is tha’ mad or summat? Nae lad. I were
invited. By Council.”
“Leeds Council?”
“Don’t be daft. Kiev
Council. They paid plane tickets, hotels, whole bloody lot.”
These were the months following the spectacular implosion of
the Soviet Empire. The old satellite states were claiming their independence from Moscow one by one and the Ukraine was one of the first in the
queue.
The new born nations were scrambling to find a
toehold in the world. I had visited the old Soviet Union a couple of times and
therefore found it utterly fascinating that the new leadership in Ukraine had
stumped up the cash to fly this gruff Yorkshire
farmer east.
Why would they do that?
The answer wasn’t hard to understand. When Carol and I had
visited Leningrad
in the depths of the winter of 1991, old women could be seen queuing for
hours on end to get into shops which were selling a range of produce that was made up of
cabbage, cabbage and more cabbage, much of it rotten.
We were fine of course. We had dollars, and a fistful of
dollars secured us access to the foreign currency shops which were reserved for
the Party elite. The new rulers of independent Ukraine had twigged on to the fact
that the road to their people’s hearts was through their stomachs. They needed
to find a way to put affordable food on the shelves and to put it there quickly.
So they had done themselves some blue sky thinking which had taken them to my
man’s farm on the outskirts of Leeds.
They paid him a visit. They told him that they would like
him to come over to Ukraine
to do the same thing on the outskirts of Kiev as he did on the outskirts of Leeds.
And the land? Oh the land was no problem. They had plenty of
land. Millions and millions of acres. They would give him the land. All they
wanted him to do was to show them how to turn that land into milk and cream and
eggs and pork.
Just like he did in Leeds.
So he accepted the invitation. Of course he did. What Yorkshire farmer would ever knock back the chance to go
and scope out a couple of thousand acres of free land. As if.
They drove him to the edge of the city and they showed him
around the sprawling collective farm they were willing to gift him. But he
needed more than a look round before coming to his decision.
“Nae point just looking lad. Tha' needs to feel the bloody
soil. Properly. So I told them to bring a digger. A big un. Told em I needed a
look at the soil. So they brought a digger and when they got ten feet down and
soil were still pitch black, I told them to stop.”
I recall him going rather misty eyed as he described the most
fertile soil he had ever seen. He told me he could get four tonnes of wheat off
each and every acre. He told me he had never seen owt like it.
I asked him how and why.
“Easy lad. Daft buggers haven’t
farmed it for seventy years. It’s barely done owt. It’s just been left fallow.”
I have no idea if he ever went east to farm those acres of
black soil. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. But it left me with a vivid picture.
When I was sixteen I saw the surface view of those very same acres. I was on a school
trip that took us through the Iron Curtain into the sinister Alice in Wonderland lunacy of the old Eastern
Bloc. We traveled by coach. One long, hot day we made the drive south from Kiev to Odessa.
It was hundreds of miles of wheat and corn and sunflowers. Flat, flat, flat.
Weathered faces under head scarves. Horse drawn transport. No traffic on the
roads. I hadn’t read any Tolstoy at that time, but if I had I would have felt
like I was a part of one of his epic tales of the vastness of the Steppe.
Ukraine
is the second largest country in Europe. After Russia. When I took my bus trip, the
one was absorbed into the other. And it was impossible not to wonder how any
country with such vast agricultural spaces could ever manage to leave its
people hungry. By this time successive Bolshevik governments had conclusively
proved that neither five year plans nor shipping people off to Siberia
in cattle trucks were good ways of putting food on the table.
A couple of years after my school trip, I learned some of the
reasons why this was the case in a university lecture hall. The topic was Soviet agriculture and
why it was such a basket case. For seventy years the men in the Politbureau had
enjoyed the same kind of cordial relationship with their farming community as the one
Liverpool fans like me have with Man United fans.
When the currency crashed to worthlessness in the months
after the 1917 October Revolution, the farmers refused to sell their grain to
the cities. Why would they? They had no interest in being paid in worthless
cash. So Trotsky got himself into the barter game. He looted every grand piano
he could find in the grand houses of Moscow and Leningrad and stuck them
on trains to the countryside. Once the loot arrived, his commissars swapped luxury
goods for grain and somehow they contained the starvation in the cities to
manageable levels.
This whole process really pissed Stalin off and he made his
mind up that it would never about to happen again. He wasn’t the kind of guy
who took kindly to being held over any kind of barrel. The problem? Pesky small
farmers refusing to release their crops. The solution? Kill the bastards. He
implemented a policy called De-Kulakisation (I guess we would call it
de-smallfarmerisation. The supermarkets are quite good at it) In the early
years of the 1930's, Stalin topped over 20 million small farmers and moved all agriculture in
to huge collective farms where resident secret policemen kept everyone honest.
The problem was that the collective farms were a complete car
crash when it came to turning out food and most of the time the people in the
cities went hungry.
In the Seventies, the Politbureau decided to loosen their grip
out of sheer desperation. They allowed 4% of the land on every collective to be
farmed by the workers themselves and they were allowed to sell anything they produced in
the market and keep the cash. It worked. By the late Seventies this 4% of land
was producing over 70% of all Soviet food.
Human nature and all that.
So.
It’s 1992 and the second largest country in Europe is all set to really become something. It has 50
million citizens itching to get a feel of what freedom is like in the flesh and they have
gazillions of the best acres on planet Earth at their disposal.
What could go wrong?
Quite a lot as it turned out. Almost everything in fact. A
few weeks ago I listened to a fascinating World Service documentary about the
slow collapse of the Ukraine.
There are no longer 52 million Ukrainians. The population has shrunk dramatically
to just over 40 million. Why? Lots of reasons. When the EU opened up to Poland and the
Baltic States, hundreds of thousands got on coaches and headed west for better
paid work. They left a vacuum in their wake. So hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians
headed west to fill the gap. Sure jobs in Warsaw
or Riga were not as well paid as jobs in London or Berlin, but the
cash was way better that jobs in Kiev or Lvov.
As the young up sticks and left, the old got sick. The
health system creaked and almost collapsed. The older generation missed the
certainly of the old Soviet days and started to drown their sorrows in a billion litres
of vodka. Soon the average lifespan of Ukraine’s men was ten years less
than that of its women.
An expert on the documentary laid out the bones of a bleak
future. She predicted that by 2030 the population of the country was going to
be down to just over thirty million: a fall of twenty million from Independence
Day. Worse still, the projected population would be increasingly old and weary as the young
people continued to go west. She said that there were serious doubts as to
whether there would be enough people left to actually maintain a viable
country.
And so once again, all of those millions upon millions of
acres of prime black soil would be left untouched at a time when the nine
billion people of planet earth need grain like never before.
The answer?
She had no answer. She wondered if anyone could ever come up
with an answer. How can you come up with twenty million energetic young people
in less than twenty years?
Impossible.
But it shouldn’t be impossible because of course we see
these very people on the news every night. They are the ones paying for death
rides across the Med in inflatable dinghies. And many if not most of these people have skills we in the
west have largely forgotten. They know how to farm. They know how to maximise
the potential from acres of black soil.
Would twenty million take up a similar offer to the one the
Kiev Council made to my man from the outskirts of Leeds?
Come East for twenty acres and a place of your own? A 21st Century
version of the old Oregon Trail? Swap the
RPG’s on the streets of Alleppo for a little house on the Ukrainian Steppe?
It has the look to me of a win, win situation.
Ukraine
gets twenty million energetic young people who would become the very best of
patriotic citizens.
Twenty million energetic young people get a chance to escape
from murder, torture, famine and torture rooms.
And of course mankind gets the shelves filled from planet
earth’s greatest larder.
If only basic common sense was allowed to prevail for once.
If only the world could find a way of running itself as a World rather than a
network of Glasgow
style gangs of Neds, all ferociously defending their turf.
The fading, aging countries of the old west are crying out
for an injection of new blood, but all most of us are frantically building higher
fences. How would the people of the Ukraine react to twenty million
immigrants coming along to save the day? Not well I think. We have all seen the Neo Nazis strutting their stuff in Independence
Square. Logic and common sense are not a part
of their world view.
So I guess we will continue to build our fences higher and
higher and soon we will add watch towers complete with machine guns to hold the
line. And we will hide on our side of the fence and get older and older until
our countries are like vast old peoples homes and every acre of land lies
fallow.
We are entering and era of walls and fences where common
sense and practicality will be banished by wave
after wave of xenophobia.
Let’s face it, the human race is really, really good at
being idiotic.
