Poland’s New Invasion
by Tracy Worcester
Poland is the last bastion of traditional farming in Europe; tens of millions of acres of productive land are still tilled without chemicals. Canadian ecologists Bacher and Spenser call Poland a “wildflower speckled oasis in the biologically sterile desert of Europe’s farmlands.”
But while Poland remains an oasis, it is an oasis besieged. Poland has sheltered from the ecological havoc beyond its borders — undamned rivers, virgin temperate forests, an intact aquatic ecosystem larger than Belgium, peasant based farming — but is now acutely at risk from an interlocking phalanx of multinational corporations and banks abetted by corrupt officials and EU bureaucrats.
The foreign take-over of Poland’s industry by a corporate-bureaucratic assault is aimed at the 25% of Poles living on farms and in rural villages. The aim of multinational agribusiness is clear. It is to “modernise” Polish agriculture by driving 1.2 million of the nation’s two million farming families off the land and to replace traditional farming with foreign owned agribusiness. With farm prices repressed by subsidised EU and US imports, rural Poland — thousands of tiny farming communities scattered in deep forests and across undulating farmlands — is in profound depression.
In February, I joined American conservationist Tom Garrett, in his fight to stop Smithfield foods, the world’s largest pork production company, from entrenching itself in Poland. Drawing on his experience with Smithfield in the US, he explained that “Everywhere this company has operated, there has been gross environmental degradation from liquefied hog faeces stored in open sewage pits and sprayed on fields. Rivers, lakes and even aquifers are polluted. In North Carolina, where industrial hog farming is particularly intense, the rivers were so polluted that toxic algae called pfiesteria piscicida began to flourish, it killed countless millions of fish and left hundreds of swimmers and boaters with neurological damage and skin lesions that refused to heal. Tourism and coastal fishing were virtually destroyed. In the mean time, communities near hog factory development, wherever it occurs, are burdened with a nauseating stench — whole counties are afflicted. You have to smell it to believe it”.
In Warsaw I accompanied a group of journalists and NGO’s to deliver a letter Tom had drafted to the European bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), signed — among others — by Robert F Kennedy jr., the Sierra Club, America’s largest charity, and Poland’s surging populist politician Andrzej Lepper. Why, the letter asked, had the EBRD, which purports to be “environmentally sensitive” organised a one hundred million dollar loan to Smithfield’s wholly owned Polish subsidiary Animex S.A. to help finance it’s invasion of Poland. The office manager, Irena Grzbowska, an attractive woman with a strong American accent, explained that “EBRD doesn’t have any experts on the project in Poland and it is too expensive to send experts over from head office in London.” She went on to say that if her memory served her correctly, Smithfield had asked to use the money for vertical integration, to raise the pigs they then slaughtered in their abattoirs. She said that the EBRD had insisted its contribution be applied to modernise Animex packing houses and pay off high interest debts. She had no answer to the charge that the EBRD had, in effect, provided “cover” for the two other lenders and helped “legitimise” Smithfield’s operations in Poland.
Our next stop was West Pomerania in Northwest Poland, a region of lakes and forests famous for its parks and animal sanctuaries. Here, the proximity to the German border (and to potential EU markets) has attracted another wholly owned Smithfield subsidiary calling itself, “Prima Farms”. Smithfield Prima has opened a massive drive to buy and convert dozens of large former state farms into intensive pig factories. Marek Kryder, of the Animal Welfare Institute, explained that Smithfield operates behind Polish registered front companies to bypass laws making it illegal for foreigners to purc