‘Subsistence’ Readings: World Bank and State Approaches to Commercialising Agriculture in Post-Communist Eurasia

Abstract

This article explores the World Bank’s project of ‘returning agriculture to the market’ through land titling reforms. It describes how World Bank and national government strategy papers distinguish between a ‘commercial’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ sector of farming and a ‘subsistence’ agricultural sector in post-communist Eurasia. The extension and growth of the former represents the desired goal of policies since the 1990s, while the latter’s numerical prominence in many countries constitutes a source of concern for authorities. The article argues that ‘subsistence’ represents a misreading of the rural population that confounds self-sufficiency with the size of farms, and casts millions of smallholders as non-economic and alien to markets. It focuses on two post-communist countries (Romania and Ukraine, extremes in terms of the introduction of property rights over agricultural land) to argue that efforts to reduce ‘subsistence’ translate into measures that increase the households’ monetary needs and are therefore going to be resisted. The article relies on analyses of World Bank and national government’s strategy papers as well as ethnographic data collected in 2013–2017 in the Ukrainian-Romanian border region.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Petr Jehlička, Aron Buzogány, as well as the anonymous reviewers of the Journal for Development Studies for their comments and encouragements. The first fieldwork round in Ukraine (2013) took place with the generous support of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. And without discussing the limited generalizability of the Polish case given that communist Poland’s attempt at collectivising agriculture failed. The Polish study cited in the document explains the decrease in small-scale farming as ‘due to the halving of the number of small farms with up to 1 hectare UAA withdrawing from production’ (Potori, Chmieliński, & Karwat-Wózniak, 2014, p. 12). What Potori et al. argue is that in Poland there were between 14 and 18 per cent increases in the numbers of farms with 30 to 50 hectares and over 50 hectares between 2002 and 2010, so farms that by no means qualify as ‘small-scale’. If the Polish case has a story to tell, then it is one of expanding or consolidating large and middle-sized farms, and of disappearing rather than consolidating and entering the commercial sector of small-scale farms.

2. These documents are also issued in English, enabling linguistic comparisons: in Romanian the same term is used as the English ‘subsistence’ (subzistență), while in Ukrainian ‘subsistence’ translates in documents as ‘production predominantly for one’s own use’ (produktsiya perevazhno dlya vlasnoho spozhivannya).

3. The Bukovina region is fairly mountainous, with 34 per cent of the Chernivets’ka region and 53 per cent of the Suceava county representing foothills and mountains. Rural households own most land on both sides of the border: in the Chernivets’ka region households own some 70 per cent of land, with an even higher share in Suceava (some 90%). In this sense, the two administrative units (the Chernivets’ka region and the Suceava county) are representative of the two countries’ highly fragmented agricultural landscape. Despite the distance from the two countries’ capitals, the region is anything but secluded: an important European road passes it (E85), representing the most important land route connecting Turkey and the Eastern Balkans with Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and the Baltic countries. On the Ukrainian side of the border, the city of Chernivtsi is home to the 33-hectare Kalynivsky bazaar.

4. See Scott for a discussion how centralising states forced rural populations to switch from subsistence to cash crops in order to meet the increasing monetised tax burden (Scott, 1977). The need to minimise expenses often translates into an avoidance of depending on markets for inputs. That economic actors seek to limit their exposure to markets (in particular in terms of inputs) and ‘integrate vertically’ in order to avoid price fluctuations in inputs that would threaten the survival of businesses, represents a common place observation in economic sociology (Bourdieu, 2005; Fligstein, 2001). In rural sociology, such avoidance of ‘upstream’ or input markets constitutes a defining feature of ‘peasant’ farming, to be distinguished from more market-integrated, ‘entrepreneurial’ farmers (Ploeg, 2008, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

The first fieldwork round in Ukraine (2013) for this research was supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung [50.13.0.018].