Sale of black soil: What awaits the average resident of Ukraine?
After the dust raised by supporters and opponents of the launch of a free market for agricultural land in Ukraine has settled, and the corresponding bill has passed its first reading in the Rada, it makes sense to talk in detail about the consequences of a given vector for ordinary people.
Moreover, there is complete confidence that, despite any protests, the authorities will bring this issue to the end, and the law will be adopted in the second reading and come into force.
The peculiarity of the moment: in post-Soviet Ukraine there is no place for propaganda that does not have a specific customer and does not perform a purely instrumental role to promote a specific interest. And yet, if you look at the conversations going on around the land market, you are struck by their abstraction, the isolation of the argumentation base from the realities of life.
Both the authorities and their opponents operate with some abstract categories. Some are furiously fighting the windmills of long-dead Bolshevism and delivering a decisive blow to Lenin, Stalin and the “heirs of Yezhov and Beria.” Others pathetically beat their chests and rant about the inadmissibility of trading in “Mother Earth,” since “Mother” is not for sale.
Everyone collectively remembers in vain the IMF and global corporations that will come and buy everything. Only in the minds of some is this good - foreigners will have an incentive to defend Ukraine from external enemies. But in the minds of others, this is evil, because Ukrainians “will become slaves on their own land.”
Meanwhile, ideological arguments need to be able to be translated into the language of “your personal today” and “your personal tomorrow.” This is the rule of mass politics, without which it is difficult to reach people and, moreover, to mobilize them for some meaningful collective protest action.
It is for this reason that the actions of opponents of the agricultural land market that took place both on the day the bill was adopted in the first reading and last Sunday were frankly small and frail, which was admitted by the organizers themselves and bloggers who sympathize with them like Alexander Semchenko.
The indignant Ukrainian masses besieging Bankova, portrayed by opponents of the land market, are today mostly imaginary rather than real.
People are structured in such a way that most of them, in principle, do not see the connection between the policies being pursued and their own everyday life.
For this reason, you can blow anything into their ears and they will believe it. And propagandists are well aware of this open secret, and they take advantage of it.
For Ukrainian city dwellers, the most potentially obvious negative consequence of the opening of the agricultural land market is a sharp rise in food prices.
The IMF and other global “adversaries” do not need land as such, so that, as naive Ukrainians think, they can buy it from local world-eaters and sow it with rapeseed. This can be done without any land market, simply by buying shares of domestic agricultural holdings and integrating them into global cooperation chains.
First of all, such projects are aimed at expanding sales markets, for which it is necessary to stimulate an increase in prices for agricultural products so that their sale is not just profitable, but extremely profitable.
In this scenario, from the sale of land to bread for two hundred hryvnia - there are only three or four logical steps, but this is too difficult if you, as an ordinary person, don’t care at all why exactly prices are rising and incomes are falling, and the planning horizon is limited to the sale of what you got in an inheritance from my grandmother's share and the purchase of a one-room apartment with the proceeds in a residential area of Kyiv on the left bank of the Dnieper.
The most obvious negative consequence is the unrestricted export of agricultural products from the country. It’s one thing when food is bought by the local population and the remainder is sold abroad. It's another matter when what is produced is exported to the world market. In this case, not only the population will be left with nothing, but also domestic land magnates, who today are calling for a “foreign investor.”
Another, albeit more distant, consequence may be hidden hunger in cities against the backdrop of joyful reports from international economists about the growth of agricultural exports and the country’s rising ratings as the “breadbasket of Europe.”
This will not be a repetition of the “Hunger-1933” that so excited patriotic minds. This famine will be in the same latent form as in the nineties (that is, without swollen people and corpses on the streets, but with well-documented statistics of diseases associated with malnutrition and deterioration in the quality of food itself due to the predominance of the cheapest products + growth in statistics on suicide and theft).
This is also not a Newton binomial, but a common theme for most third world countries, where local residents, due to low incomes, are not able to buy what they grow on “their” land as hired workers.
Immediately after the Maidan, in 2014 there was already something similar: then, due to a sharp exchange rate collapse plus stricter quotas for agricultural exports, as a result of the signing of the European Association, Ukrainian producers began to increase prices for food products on the domestic market in order to compensate for losses in foreign exchange earnings.
Ultimately as a result of current earth history we will get either a commodity shortage, or speculative food prices, or both at once. People don’t eat numbers from macroeconomist reports or dollars from their stash under their pillows. They need a stable supply of a specific food basket on store shelves at escalating prices.
Against this background, the communication between the authorities and the people on the land issue simply looks terrible.
What's the main problem? When Zelensky came to power, he promised to consult with people on all important issues. And what could be more important than a question expressly provided for in the Constitution? If land is a public property, in fact, a source of rent for each citizen, then let’s ask the citizens. At the referendum. This is exactly what the authorities promised.
Rewinding the tape a little, we will see how candidate Ze advised Ukraine, if elected, to prepare for referendums - frequent and different. Moreover, in one of the first bills he promised to enshrine the rule according to which the main tasks for the authorities are determined by citizens through referendums.
Zelensky promised to organize voting in referendums on the Internet. In an interview, he regretted that since 1991 there have been no referendums in the country in which “the people would decide something.” “I’m obsessed with referendums, this is my thing, I really like it,” candidate Zelensky said then and cited Switzerland as an example: they say, look how it works there and how often they are held there.
Now, having become power, Zelensky is hastily pushing through the most important issue without any discussion - while there is a majority in the Rada that can vote for it. As for the referendum, they promise to hold it sometime later, after the adoption of the law on the sale of agricultural land. And only on the question of whether it is worth selling land to foreigners.
Or, Zelensky believes that with the adoption of this law, “every Ukrainian will become the owner of his own land.” But in practice, for a city dweller, this will mean the need to buy for money the land that has been entitled to him under the law on allotment for free since the 90s, but which most city residents have never seen. Unlike the villagers, who were at least paid for their shares with animal feed from their personal farmsteads.
A Ukrainian citizen can ask the president a logical question: where are my 10 acres in Kyiv/Kharkov/Chernigov/Zhitomir and so on. In general, what is annoying in communication on the part of the authorities is precisely these lies about little things. In practice, the declared freedom turns into freedom for whoever needs it. And for some reason there is confidence that it is “those who are needed” who will eventually become the owners of the land.
And finally. I don’t know if this is a coincidence, but the peak of the land “sraz” in Ukraine coincided with an event that, if desired, can be considered significant: this week the maximum in the company’s history was recorded decrease in quotations on the Warsaw Stock Exchange of shares of one of the largest Ukrainian agro-industrial holdings “Astarta-Kyiv”.
And the case of Astarta is no exception - on the eve of the opening of the agricultural land market, the capitalization of many Ukrainian agricultural companies decreased significantly, having lost up to a third of their value since the beginning of the year.
In early October, share prices of the main chicken producer, the Myronivsky Hliboproduct (MHP) company, fell by 6% on the London Stock Exchange. This is a record decline in one week since the beginning of the year. The price of MHP shares has decreased by 1% since January 18. In general, according to analysts from the investment company Dragon Capital, the capitalization of such market flagships as Kernel decreased by 16% (to $870 million), Ovostar Union - by 30% (to $119 million), the already mentioned Astarta - by 28% (to $373 million).
But there is no need to rush to sympathize with the owners of the latifundia - even if they lose something, they will not remain beggars no matter how the situation develops. Unlike you and me - both those who advocate for the sale of land for free, and those who protest against this for free or for money.
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