August 14, 2009
What can you buy for 27 lei ($2.45)? Half a pack of Parliament cigarettes. Three ice cream bars. Six packs of Orbit chewing gum. A short ride in a taxi with a little left over to help pay for a ticket to the movies.
But spending a weekend in a village in northern Moldova completely changed my view of what 27 lei is. That’s exactly how much 1 kilogram of pig meat will earn you. That’s the price that middlemen have set for buying pork in the villages. They then take the meat to towns and cities and sell it for 90-98 lei.
Natalia Morari blogs for RFE/RL's Moldovan Service Farmers are in a no-win situation. If they don’t sell for 27 lei, they won’t find any buyers for their meat. You won’t be able to go to a market somewhere and try to sell your meat for, say, 50 lei. They won’t let you in – all the market stalls are taken by the retailers working with the middlemen.
Anyone with the nerve to try to get a stall will soon give up the effort – either they won’t get a license or the health inspectors won’t sign their forms.
I was told that it takes from six months to a year to raise a decent pig. You feed it, take care of it. All that takes money and time and effort. After a year of work, you get about 300-400 lei for your pig. And the guy you sell it to turns around the next day and gets 1,200-1,600 lei for his “efforts.” Your average villager raises two or three pigs a year – that’s all he can afford to do.
I met a guy named Mircea, who is considered a prosperous farmer in his village. In addition to two pigs, some cows, and a couple dozen chickens, he has a pretty nice vineyard. In fact, he has no garden because all the land around his house is planted with grapes. He expects to produce about 60 buckets of wine this year. The best price he’ll get for the wine is about 10 lei a liter, meaning that his gross income on the wine will be 6,000 lei.
In other words, he tended his vines for a year and earned almost $1,000. He’ll take that money and buy some firewood, silage, and, maybe, something to eat.
I guess it is up to the proper government agencies to figure out if it is normal that rural dwellers earn kopecks while all the profits from their work go to middlemen. And they should look into this soon, inasmuch as almost 60 percent of the population lives in the country and works the land.
I’d really like to look in the eyes of those who for the last eight years talked of almost nothing except supporting the village and reviving the Moldovan countryside. It looks like they revived something else entirely.
A "distorted generation"
August 06, 2009
I didn't really feel like writing about politics today, but it's impossible to avoid. We're a distorted generation -- we go to cafes and meet up in parks, but it only takes a few seconds before we are immersed in our favorite topics: the Communists, the opposition, is there a coalition or isn't there? You go to a club on a Saturday night and the first thing you hear is: Who did you vote for?
Why couldn't everything be simple, like it is for typical young people in Europe -- sex, money, celebrity? What more could you want? But no, we need forums for free discussion, democracy, and middle-of-the-night conversations about whether Moldova should align with Russia or the European Union. There's just something wrong with us.
Natalia Morari blogs for RFE/RL's Moldovan Service That was the impression that some of the foreign journalists who came to Moldova last week to cover the elections seemed to come away with. They used to think that our country was pretty apolitical. If they heard anything about us, it was just from jokes about Moldovan girls and construction workers. And it's possible that nine years ago, that's about all there was. But not now.
I'm not talking about all young people, of course. But I am talking about a pretty important, if small, segment of the country's youth. I call them "not indifferents." And there are more of them now.
I remember when I enrolled at Moscow State University in 2002. None of the people my age that I knew could care less about what was happening in the country or what would become of it. Now, most of them still want to go abroad, but some of them -- OK, only a few -- are thinking that they won't leave for good. (They're basically thinking they'll try to earn some money abroad and then return.) But the main thing is that now they care about who wins elections; they care about the country and its future.
It may sound stupid to say, but the defeat of the Communists in the last elections (with all the well-known qualifications) was a necessary, fundamental event. Not least in the process of forming this newborn class of "not indifferents" and active youths whose childhood came after Moldova had already become independent and who are familiar with the Soviet mentality only through the stories of their grandparents.
The system has begun to change -- whether for better or worse, we'll find out soon enough. But it's begun to change, and that's the main thing.
Now we're entering a very difficult, but pivotal, time. This new class (in the future it will undoubtedly become the basis of an ordinary middle class, which hardly exists now) is forming the demand for a new political elite and new, effective policies. They are the demand for new, albeit harsh, reforms and decisions.
Yes, this is a difficult period. But we have begun moving in the right direction. Yes we can!
P.S. I was talking to some people I know who read this blog and I decided that in upcoming posts I will begin a discussion of the initial steps that need to be taken so that the words "developed Moldova" stopped just being empty sounds and a subject for jokes. I hope you'll join in. Who knows? Maybe someone will read us and find some of our ideas useful.