5th Aleksanteri Conference
Reflecting Transformation in Post-socialist Rural Areas
11.10.2005, University of Helsinki
Roundtable Discussion
New Roles of Countryside in Post-Socialist Societies
Opening words by Leo Granberg:
Western Europe is expiring in these decades a thoroughgoing turn from agricultural
countryside to a new phase, during which rural areas receive increasingly the role of an
area for leisure time and an area with environmental tasks and responsibilities. As far as
production is concerned, countryside is no more exclusively a space for raw material
production in a mass scale for food production. In agriculture, increasing part of fields is
used to produce specialties like organic food, healthy food and even non-food products
like bio-energy.
In Western Europe, out-migration from rural areas continues. Newcomers use not to be
farmers and farmers are the minority of rural population almost everywhere. In spite of
the ideological offensives of the style ‘small is beautiful’, farming is still concentrating in
growing units. In spite of better road connections and new information technology, social
exclusion and marginalization are still a reality on rural peripheries.
For post-socialist countryside, the main question is how to adopt the Western political
and economic system and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which are in a rapid
change.
What is the future of post-socialist countryside?
This future depends much on three open questions, concerning global trends, concerning
the European model of farming, and concerning the social structure and the solutions to
rural poverty in CEE countries and outside of EU.
Concerning global trends, the future of economic environment is decisive for the
opportunity structures of agricultural and entrepreneurial activities in the countryside.
Neo-liberalist thinking has dominated international trade policy during the last two to
three decades. Will this also be the future or will there be a turn to an increasing
regulation in one form or another? Another increasingly relevant question is the future of
bio-energy production. In the case that it will be started in large scale, millions of
hectares of arable land may be turned from food production into energy production. This
might mean a dramatic turn in the trend of agricultural overproduction after a century of
increasing food production.
Concerning the European model of farming, in the last few years multifunctional
agriculture has increasingly been referred to as such a model. The concept
multifunctionality refers to the increasing role of farms and rural actors to take care of
other tasks than food production – that means the work for reproducing traditional
landscape and clean environment, contributing regional employment, serving raw
material for healthy food, facilitating biodiversity etc. The question for us is, whether
multifunctionality is only political and ideological construction or can it be a real
alternative to develop countryside in post-socialist countries?
Concerning social structure, transition was carried out with great wishes about the future
of family farming, as the becoming basic production form in agriculture. This solution –
as it was believed – would have brought more or less automatically positive outcomes in
the reconstruction of agriculture as well as in coping with social, economic and ecologic
problems in the countryside. After 15 years of transition, large-scale farming is still an
important production form in most Central and Eastern European countries and in Russia.
Small household plots are still unavoidable for millions of families in these countries, not
to enjoy their holiday time in rural areas but in order to cover their daily needs in food
consumption.
After all, rural poverty is continuously one of the greatest problems in post-socialist
countries. For societies as a whole, it is utmost important challenge to find a solution in
this problem in coming 10 years. How to reach the goal of prosperity in the countryside
from these starting points?