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If London is a city of pigeons, Warsaw in winter, before the return of spring migrants, is a city of crows. Saski (Saxon) Park, in downtown Warsaw, contains a full range of European corvids. Jackdaws swirl around the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Rooks strut and caw. There are Alpine choeghs, acrobatic fliers with curved, yellow beaks and magpies with iridescent tails. Flocks of European jays, large, noisy birds with brown, black and white markings often appear; the smaller corvids, nutcrackers and starlings, are abundant. All give a wide birth to the formidable 20 inch, gray and black hooded crows, the common crow of northern Europe and dominant species, save one, in matters corvine. Ravens themselves, are not urban birds. But jogging in first light on a Sunday morning, I finally saw a pair of ravens sitting together on the park's highest monument, regarding me, it seemed, silently and wisely. The profusion of bird life in Poland's capital is no anomaly. Poland's forests, untouched river floodplains, vast tracts of preserved marshes, millions of hectares of farmland unpoisoned by pesticides or herbicides, are home to over 200 avian species driven to rarity or extinction in Western Europe. There is no better gauge of the ecological health of Poland vs. Western Europe than the status of the white stork. More than a quarter of the world's remaining white storks - over 40,000 pairs - nest in Poland compared to 3-4,000 in Germany, 400 in Austria, less than 100 in France, 8 in Denmark and none in Belgium. For some birds, the Greater Spotted Eagle perhaps, and the Great Snipe, dependence is absolute; they survive as Poland endures. While Poland remains an oasis, it is an oasis besieged. All that Poland has sheltered from the ecological havoc beyond its borders - undammed rivers, virgin temperate forests, an aquatic ecosystem larger than Belgium, a traditional, peasant based agriculture - is acutely at risk from European Union (EU) demands of economic subjugation as the price for Poland's accession to the EU and from an interlocking phalanx of multinational corporations and banks. With foreign takeover of Poland's industry all but consummated and once powerful unions impotent, the corporate-bureaucratic assault is aimed at the 25% of Poland's population living on farms and in tiny rural villages. The aim of the EU converges precisely with the designs of multinational agribusiness: "modernize" Polish agriculture by driving 1.2 million of the nation's two million farm families off the land, thereby facilitating replacement of traditional agriculture by industrial agriculture. Poland runs the risk of meeting the same fate as the United Kingdom. There, almost as a template for what is now happening in Poland, EU guidelines were used as a pretext for shutting down the great majority of the UK's small slaughterhouses. By wiping out small slaughterhouses, the small shops relying on them were denied a source of supply and small farmers who sold to them were denied a market. As multinationals took over, the average length of time animals waited in trucks to be slaughtered increased seven fold. There was a vast increase in the export, import, and suffering of live animals. Food poisoning, almost unknown in the UK, increased dramatically. Outbreaks of mad cow disease, swine fever, and finally foot and mouth disease ravaged the island. In the wake of the foot and mouth disaster, livestock were reduced to smoldering pyres and British tourism took a 15 billion pound loss. It is upon the struggle for rural Poland, pitting the massed power of banks and bureaucracy against indefatigable farmers that the environmental future of the nation hinges. Beating Back Big Agriculture In September 1999 Smithfield Food's CEO Joe Luter made a grandiloquent promise to "repeat Smithfield's American success in Poland." AWI responded by bringing a delegation of Polish farm leaders to the US to see firsthand what lay ahead if Luter succeeded. Horrified at what he saw, Andrzej Lepper, the head of Poland's formidable Samoobrona (Self Defense) farmer's union, vowed to halt the Smithfield invasion. In July 2000, in an interview in the Washington Post, Luter admitted that his effort to establish "vertically integrated pork production" in Poland had been stopped in its tracks. Undeterred, Luter telegraphed his next move: Smithfield's future in Poland, he said, depended on the Polish government making the difficult political decision to close thousands of "backyard slaughterhouses" with which Animex, Smithfield's subsidiary, was forced to compete. 
Left: A 40 acre pasture, complete with a water system, movable hutches and a self feeder at Barka's 1,000 acre farm in western Poland. Right: The hutches are filled with straw and large enough for a grown man to recline. AWI then invited Dr. Bartosz Winiecki, head of Poland's National Veterinary Chamber, an organization representing Poland's 10,000 veterinarians, Renata Beger, pig farmer and small slaughterhouse owner, and five colleagues for a tour of the American Midwest. After passing through the hog factory-blighted counties of northern Missouri, where one can drive for twenty miles without losing sight of identical metal hog sheds, our friends spent a few days in Iowa visiting family farms raising pigs humanely under AWI criteria. Upon her return to Poland, Ms. Beger immediately converted her hog barns to the deep straw. AWI next worked to introduce the Niman Ranch hog raising system to Poland. We worked with the Barka Self Help Foundation, which combats poverty by creating self-sustaining communities, to set up a model pasture and deep straw system of raising hogs. While AWI demonstrated humane husbandry, "Big Ag's" Polish assault entered a critical phase. In August 2000, Luter met for three hours with Prime Minister Buzek, reportedly demanding that the small slaughterhouses be shut down. Ratcheting up the pressure, Smithfield began closing the packing plants it had acquired with such fanfare less than two years earlier. Thousands of workers lost their jobs. In November, Chief Veterinarian Andrzej Komorowski presented the Polish Parliament with a "model law" drafted in his department within the Agriculture Ministry, designed, he said, to "harmonize" Poland's Veterinary Act with EU regulations. He stated that no more than a third of Poland's 4200 slaughterhouses would "have a chance" to survive under the new regulations. Ultimately, 70% of Polish "meat production" would occur in 24 large slaughterhouses. That Komorowski would emerge as a tool of foreign agribusiness surprised no one. He is under investigation - among other things - for arranging the "disappearance" of tens of thousands of tons of imported boneless chicken, that could not be legally sold in Poland, between Gdansk and the Ukrainian border. In April 2001, the Agriculture Ministry brought a package of amendments before the Agriculture Commission of Poland's parliament. The bill was managed by SLD (post-communist) deputy Jozef Pilarczyk, a long-time supporter of foreign agribusiness. Despite fierce opposition, he succeeded in passing the bill in the Sejm. President Kwasniewski vetoed portions of the bill. Unfortunately, however, eclipsed by a battle over animal welfare, the Veterinary Act amendments survived to become law. The Tightening Siege In February 2002, I flew to Warsaw to join AWI's Polish consultant Marek Kryda and AWI International Committee member Dr. Agnes Van Volkenburgh at a conference on slaughterhouses jointly sponsored by Samoobrona and AWI. The conference was chaired by Renata Beger, now the Secretary of Samoobrona, and attracted 200 slaughterhouse owners and workers from throughout Poland. Dr. Van Volkenburgh explained how "consolidation" of slaughterhouses in the US had not only opened the way to "vertical integration" and factory farming but vastly increased the suffering of animals who languish long hours in trucks waiting to die and are subjected to atrocities in the plants. She pointed out that far from improving hygiene, "consolidation" led to a 500% increase in US food poisoning and that it made meatpacking the most dangerous occupation in America. Dr. Jacek Leonkiewicz from the National Veterinary Chamber then rose to present a grim scenario. He described a situation in which the Ministry of Agriculture is moving, with complete impunity, to do exactly what foreign agribusiness wants: shut down virtually every small slaughterhouse in Poland. Very small slaughterhouses, with a capacity of under 7 tons per day, are to be eliminated arbitrarily. Veterinary regulations applying to the remainder, said Dr. Leonkiewicz, who has 20 years experience inspecting slaughterhouses, make no sense at all from the standpoint of hygiene or humaneness. They were, he said, deliberately designed to overwhelm smaller slaughterhouses with financially burdensome retrofitting and forced them to close. Dr. Leonkiewicz stressed that EU is not responsible for the Polish regulations, especially the bias against small slaughterhouses, noting that in Hesse and other German states small slaughterhouses are subsidized to ensure that they remain open. He predicted that enforcement of current regulations would allow no more than 50 slaughterhouses, almost all large, foreign-owned industrial plants, to remain in operation. Owners buttressed Leonkiewicz's conclusions with first hand accounts. We learned that Jozef Pilarczyk, the new Vice Minister of Agriculture, had suddenly truncated the July 2002 deadline for applying for an extension of time to finish retrofitting. If his ruling stands, it means that over 2000 slaughterhouses unable to submit paperwork by March 1st have lost the opportunity and have little chance to survive. We were left with no doubt that, as in Britain and the US, the centerpiece of the corporate takeover strategy - although other food processing has by no means been ignored - is the "consolidation" of slaughterhouses. It was clear, too, that the Polish Ministry of Agriculture has become a virtual captive of foreign agribusiness and that the siege of Poland is rapidly tightening. The Politics of Survival In the September 2001 parliamentary elections, the discredited Solidarity government was wiped from the political map and replaced by a post-communist (SLD) and peasant party (PSL) coalition. While there is no sign that the new government is an improvement over its predecessor, the election brought a breath of hope. Samoobrona took 53 seats in the 460 seat Sejm. Two other new parties, Law and Justice, formed expressly to combat governmental corruption, and the ultra-nationalist League of Polish Families gained 83 additional seats. These reform parties form a core of opposition to foreign takeover. With unemployment at 20% and government poll numbers plunging (the latest showed 63% disapproval), support for them is rapidly growing. The anti-corruption campaigns of Andrzej Lepper and Lech Kaczynski, head of Law and Justice, are a particular danger to companies like Smithfield. For all its money "Big Ag" is critically dependent on captive agencies and inside operatives. 
Rare Polish spotted pig follows a caretaker at Barka's Chudopczyce farm. (photos by Diane Halverson/AWI) Ultimately, the outcome of the struggle will depend on Polish farmers themselves, families who live on farms tilled sustainably, in many places, for a thousand years. Polish peasants carried out a fierce partisan campaign against the Germans and faced down the communists on the issue of collectivization. During the Soviet-Polish crisis of 1956, the greatest deterrent to Soviet invasion was a partisan campaign to thwart their supply lines to Germany. In 1999, farmers blockaded roads throughout Poland; at one point there were 2000 roadblocks. Poland's farmers will not go gently into the good night. |
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Preserving Poland's Family Farms
