(story to be published in tomorrow’s issue, March 24)
The Ministry of Agriculture spoke yesterday in Government in favour of approving the statute of a Company selling agricultural technology for barter with farming products, by which peasants can exchange their wheat or corn for a harrow, a sowing machine or a tractor. Two rabbits in a blow! On one hand, agriculture is mechanised and we will see fewer peasants behind ploughs pulled by animals, and on the other hand, the almost bankrupt state companies will find their market. The ministry’s officials have calculated that, to buy “a package of agricultural equipment,” a peasant needs no less than $17,948. The package consists of a tractor worth exactly $8,974 as well as agricultural machinery of the same value. Isn’t there some kind of error? Perhaps it’s $17,949.45 ? Or $17,945.66 ? More, Agriculture officials go as far as calculating how many hectares of crop must be harvested to make the dollars for the “package.” It is 288 hectares, and if only a tractor is needed, it is naturally just 144 hectares. But how do we calculate if the package is to be paid in instalments? Simple: divide by the number of years we can afford. So that, the Agriculture officials are teaching us, if the entire profit off “areas needed for exploitation” is used to buy the “package,” 28.8 hectares are needed for five-year instalments, and 144 hectares for two-year instalments. Ten years after the bankruptcy of socialist agriculture, the bureaucrats’ thinking rooted in the socialist planning is still showing. It doesn’t matter that in the Romanian agriculture the average stretch of land is under two hectares and producers are sitting on wheat and corn in their barns because the markets are strangled by a few wholesalers who occasionally announce that we are in some crisis, for instance, in a wheat crisis. It doesn’t matter that even today, the property laws, the first thing a state should take care of, are not guaranteed, and land restitution is not over, so that land circulation starts up and larger farms start coagulating. It doesn’t matter that the planned Bucharest wholesale market, which could have brought civilisation and openness to vegetable and fruit trade in the city, has almost failed. And it doesn’t matter that markets in almost every city are suffocated by loafers-turned-traders, recruited from local neighbourhoods, who team up with market managers and charge money from those entering the market. What will another state company, another structure in the immense labyrinth of bureaucracy, do? Invent what has been invented thousands of years ago – money. If the peasants had money, they would easily buy tractors worth exactly $8,974 from Tractorul Brasov, money down or in instalments if the manufacturer had enough financial power to credit them. But no, Tractorul Brasov has the financial power to contribute 175 billion lei to the capital of the Company selling agricultural technology for barter with farming products, besides other state companies, whose capital is undoubtedly exceeded by their debts: MAT Craiova, Sema Bucuresti, Mecod Codlea. Last summer, a much-hyped system was to be organised by which pigs bred at Comtim would be exchanged for peasants’ grain, in order to rescue the company from bankruptcy. Later, the Ministry of Industry thought up a system by which Petrom would exchange marked diesel oil for cereals. For some time, nothing has been said about the two systems that would pull the agriculture out of the impasse. We expect the same fate will befall this invention.