Dissuading the state: food security, peasant resistance and environmental concerns in rural Bulgaria

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to explore the responses of villagers from north-western Bulgaria to neoliberal policies promoted by the post-socialist state in rural areas. We show the two strategies people mobilise in order to defend their interests. A first method is the everyday peasant strategy of resistance: quiet, covered and unopened acts of defiance against the neoliberal policies concerning food acquisition and food production. A second method of reaction is the open protest organised against a newly established polluting enterprise, which is feared to threaten their livelihoods. In both cases villagers use historically formed transnational networks based on friendship and kinship.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article cherche à explorer les réponses de villageois du nord-ouest de la Bulgarie aux politiques néolibérales promues dans les zones rurales par l’Etat post-socialiste. Nous documentons deux stratégies qu’ils mobilisent pour défendre leurs intérêts. Une première voie est la résistance paysanne quotidienne : des actes de défiance silencieux, discrets et cachés contre les politiques néolibérales concernant l’acquisition de nourriture et la production alimentaire. La deuxième forme de résistance est la manifestation ouverte organisée contre une entreprise polluante soupçonnée de menacer leurs moyens de subsistance. Dans les deux cas, les villageois utilisent des réseaux transnationaux historiques basés sur l’amitié et la parenté.

KEYWORDS:

• Food security
• neoliberalism
• peasant resistance
• protest movements
• Bulgaria

Acknowledgements

We thank the two reviewers whose comments helped us sharpen the analysis and to Anna Hajdu, our linguistic guardian angel, who made this article more readable.

Notes on contributors

Stefan Dorondel is a Senior Researcher at the Francisc I. Rainer Institute of Anthropology Bucharest, interested in environmental changes in post-socialist countries. He is the author of Disrupted Landscapes: State, Peasants and the Politcs of Land in Post-Socialist Romania (Berghahn, 2016) and the co-author (with Thomas Sikor, Johannes Stahl and Phuc Xuan To) of When Things Become Property: Land Reform, Authority and Value in Postsocialist Europe and Asia (Berghahn, 2017).

Stelu Şerban is a sociologist at the Institute for Southeast European Studies, Bucharest, interested in post-socialist transformations in south-east Europe, everyday life in rural societies, ethnicity and political ecology. He is the author of Elites, Parties and Political Spectrum in the Interwar Romania ([in Romanian], Bucharest, 2006), and co-editor (with Stefan Dorondel) of the edited volume At the Margins of History. Agrarian Question in Southeast Europe (Bucharest, 2014).

ORCID

Stefan Dorondel http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8722-6242

Notes

1 The extensive literature on the new peasant movements cannot be reviewed here.

2 From the initial meaning that referred to the right of all people to physical food access in terms of quantity and quality, the concept of food security evolved into food sovereignty, which refers to the right of a nation to develop and maintain its capacity to produce food respecting cultural diversity (Patel 2009; Via Campesina 1996 cited in Patel 2009, 665). Authors such as Cid Aguayo and Latta (2015) clearly distinguish between food security and food sovereignty; they consider the latter to focus on modes of production rather than on food affordability and access, and emphasise its political agenda. We use “food security” throughout the article because it better serves our theoretical and methodological standpoint.

3 This enterprise was privatised in the 1990s and is now owned by a Turkish company. Most local villagers were dismissed.

4 Those who work for the nearby gypsum mine have the highest salaries in the village, around 400–500 leva (200–250 Euros). Those who work in nearby Vidin city – not more than 20 people – earn about the same amount. Those who worked for the collective farm have a monthly pension of roughly 100 leva (50 Euros) and those who have social benefits receive less than 100 leva/month.

5 People who migrated from Wallachia in the nineteenth or early twentieth century.

6 More than 1,000 kilometres of embankment had been built along the Romanian Danube since the 1960s; however, there are small portions that were never dammed.

7 Şerban conducted three months of fieldwork in 2014 and 2015 within the village, and helped Georgiev carry his merchandise, while Dorondel conducted one month.

8 Informal credit is widespread in eastern Europe. On Romania, see Lăţea and Chelcea (2002, 2003). See Durst (2016) on Hungary.

9 Obviously, no one in the village would use the word “neoliberal”. People use the term “communism” for the period before 1989 and “now, in democracy” for the current period.

10 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers from drawing our attention to this point.

11 We do not have accounts of such activities in Slanotran or nearby villages.

12 Details from the zhalba (literally “written complaint” in Bulgarian) filed to the Environmental Commissioner of the European Commission. We thank Slanotran’s mayor and Elena Svetoslavova (the lawyer hired by villagers) for providing us with a copy.

13 There is a growing literature on environmental degradation in former socialist south-east European countries. For an overview, see Dorondel (2016b).

14 Calafat is a small city on the Romanian bank.

15 The history of these fairs goes back to the nineteenth century. During socialism they started to be held again in the early 1960s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Romanian Research Agency (Ministry of National Education, CNCS–UEFISCDI), grant no. PN II-ID-PCE-2012-4-0587 (2013–2016).