The War in Ukraine and Food Security in Eastern Europe Free

The impact of the war on Eastern European food systems was felt immediately after the Russian invasion, as hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes. At the time of writing, the number of internally displaced persons and refugees from Ukraine has affected over five times as many people as at the height of the so-called EU⁵ refugee “crisis” of 2015. As of late April 2022, over five million Ukrainians have fled their country: 2.8 million to Poland; 757,000 to Romania; 471,000 to Hungary; 426,000 to Moldova; 342,000 to Slovakia, 550,000 to Russia; and 24,000 to Belarus.⁶ To date, little international coordination has occurred in efforts to resettle and assist Ukrainian refugees—a notable exception is an E.U.-financed logistical hub in Suceava, Romania⁷ (Fodor 2022). This means that some of the poorest countries in Europe are now providing the most aid to refugees, which for reasons we cover below is not sustainable in the long term.

Poland, as the country receiving the largest number of refugees, provides a useful insight into the often overwhelming physical materialities of aid flows. These can be characterized essentially as a dumping of goods with little research or forethought into actual refugee needs or in-country storage and distribution capacities. A large amount of humanitarian aid from domestic and international sources (in the present situation, from countries including Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, and Norway⁸) are collected and processed in Poland to be sent to Ukraine, as well as distributed domestically. In practice, the delivery of goods has occurred with little warning or coordination and with very limited help from state agencies. This has meant that the Polish public and various civil society organizations have taken on the full spectrum of roles involved in aid: from welcoming and coordinating to supporting refugees, a set-up that veers between crisis and solidarity (Thieme, Kovács, and Ramakrishnan 2020).

The significance of civil society work may be surprising considering what some scholars have characterized as a sector that is weak in Eastern Europe (Jacobsson and Korolczuk 2017). Polish support and welcome to Ukrainian refugees are based entirely on grassroots mobilization of individuals, businesses, educational institutions, neighborhood centers, nongovernmental organizations, and local councils. From a refugee perspective, this means that food and essentials are available from a variety of ad hoc distribution points, from railway stations to special “no-money” shops.

Social solidarity and generosity requires coordination for long-term sustainability. As support—including food aid—has been based on a myriad of initiatives rather than coordinated and overseen at a system level, aid is characterized by its dispersed, emergency-oriented, and often chaotic approach (Kozak 2022). This is characteristic not only of post-socialist states but across the region (Simsa 2017). Aid has been delivered under pressing time circumstances with limited skills and financial resources; food aid is among the most difficult in the aid process as a result of perishability and inadequate long-term planning. Currently, Polish support centers complain frequently of a persistent lack of foodstuffs, and a surplus of clothes and toys. This speaks to discrepancies between refugees’ actual and imagined needs, and the challenges organizations face, from sourcing (fresh and storable) produce, to packaging and distributing it.

The current uncoordinated aid system leads to enormous amounts of waste, a symptom of both overlapping informal networks and a top-down approach to aid, particularly on the part of large international donors that send goods and supplies without grounded knowledge or reconnaissance of existing needs. Waste comes in many forms, as poorly packed or perishable goods do not reach their destination before spoiling, and bulky items (especially clothes) are sent where there is no need or capacity for them. These donations waste enormous amounts of volunteer time, give rise to storage and transport problems, and in many cases end in pollution as donations are burned or dumped. Waste, then, consists of wasting time, labor, clean air, and people’s skills.

In this context, the absence of the state and its agencies has been stark. After more than two months of war, the Polish government has not assumed the role of coordinator nor food and infrastructure provider to refugees. State efforts and laws are entirely reactionary—for example, at the end of March, Poland introduced a new law granting Ukrainian refugees a personal identification number that grants them access to public services, lawful employment, and some basic financial support. Apart from formalizing refugees’ rights, however, state agencies have not developed linking and integration strategies to aid refugees in accessing essential items, accommodation, or work. Refugees are often left alone or must rely on personal support. For many, mostly women, one of the first survival strategies is to turn to informal food production (mainly dumplings, simple homemade dinners, and cakes), which operates entirely through social media platforms or local networks.⁹

This passive response harkens back to the 2015 EU refugee “crisis” (Mica et al. 2020) when local governments (following national policy) resisted establishing specialized institutions or response pathways to meet refugee needs.¹⁰ Reliance on the uncoordinated work of volunteers, NGOs, and other nongovernmental entities means that refugees have had vastly different experiences and access to resources, including food, and there is no formal insight into their diverse situations from which aid may be better provided.

We use Poland here as an example of the conditions and realities that welcome refugees throughout the region. Crucial to note is the extent to which civil and informal support networks are being eroded by the growing inflationary crisis affecting many domestic and regional economies. This means that the refugee crisis joins many already developing crises. These include unprecedented increases in food and energy prices in the aftermath of governments’ stimulus packages during the COVID-19 pandemic, and global supply and trade issues as a result of the ongoing war (Sas 2022; Polish Inflation 2022; Rushe et al. 2022). Reduced household purchasing power has knock-on effects on individuals’ abilities to contribute to refugee provisioning and reception, as people increasingly struggle to make their own ends meet. We look at these dynamics next through the prism of smallholders in the region.

To better understand the challenges that food systems are facing after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this section presents a brief overview of the region’s prevalence of small-scale farms and short supply chains.

Unlike Western Europe, a large proportion of the region’s land continues to be farmed by smallholders. Smallholder farming was an inseparable part of the socialist agricultural economy that operated informally as household plots or subsidiary farms. Yet it was only after land privatization and titling reforms in the early 1990s that smallholders gained prominence in regional supply chains (Davidova, Fredriksson, and Bailey 2009; Wegren and O’Brien 2018). At the same time, there was sustained growth in large monopolies and agribusinesses, particularly for those capitalizing on the former collective and state-run farms. Today, many of these enterprises are owned by new elites with close ties to the ruling political parties or classes or to international corporations. Unlike in Western Europe, many of the largest farm businesses have had to maintain relations of mutual dependence with local smallholders, as often small family farms formally own the land and also provide cheap, though often highly skilled, labor in exchange for access to technologies (Allina-Pisano 2004; Visser 2008; Kovács 2019).

Smallholder farms hold complex local roles that are extra-economic. This means they are not driven only by profit but also by complex considerations that arise as a result of their embeddedness within local networks of production and consumption (Aistara 2018; Bachórz and Parasecoli 2021; Matijevic and Boni 2019; Tisenkopfs et al. 2020). These farms are depicted as inefficient by mainstream economic institutions, which promote larger, more intensive, mechanised, and market-oriented family farms (e.g., see Juska 2007). This approach was also adopted by national and EU institutions in the post-accession phase as well as by governments with EU integration aspirations and is reflected in the structure of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) payments, which exclude the smallest farmholdings (Mincyte 2011; Piras et al. 2021; Varga 2019). While national policies and additional support schemes differ across the region, many smallholders cannot receive subsidies or incentives through the EU’s CAP for the environmental and social benefits they generate, either because their farms are smaller than a minimum size threshold (1 hectare) or because they do not operate as economic agents and do not engage in commercialization. A strong bias against smallholders, driven by a search for scale economies that dates to the Soviet period, is also present in Russia (Visser et al. 2015).

Today, unsustainable economic incentive structures (low food prices, high production costs, limited support), together with the challenges posed by food safety and other regulations, have made it nearly impossible to turn a smallholding farm into a viable business. This has driven many smallholders out of agriculture (Piras et al. 2018; Piras et al. 2021). In Moldova and Ukraine there is no equivalent to the single-payment system of the EU’s CAP. Any funding is usually assigned on a competitive basis by the national government or the many international donors following the elaboration of a business development plan (which in Moldova has replaced an equally unfair first-come, first-served basis) within which smallholders are neither recognized nor competitive. In parallel, large-scale land acquisitions facilitated by integration within global markets result in replacement of farms that could already have been considered large, by even larger corporate entities without local embeddedness from owners, workers, or land use (Kuns 2017). This is the case especially in Ukraine and Moldova but also in the EU, primarily in Romania.¹¹

The ongoing consolidation of land holdings has had an immediate negative impact on rural livelihoods. Being heavily mechanized, the new, large farms require minimal labor; thus, rural youth and older laborers are left with few local employment opportunities. Out-migration to cities and abroad has significantly grown, even if patterns of circular and returning migration can be observed. On many smallholding farms, the elderly (more often women due to longer life expectancy) are left to manage farms, with limited resources.¹² As a result of outmigration and aging, the rural purchasing power is reduced, and these areas are not attractive to the modern food retail system (often Western-owned companies).

Despite these trends and challenges, smallholder farms have proven more resilient than expected by the institutions advocating for market reforms: many individuals and families have retained land ownership, and many continue to grow food, some for subsistence, others as different forms of adaptation to local conditions (Visser et al. 2019; Mamonova 2015). This culture of food self-provisioning not only persists but has expanded to cities outside of major financialized centers (Bilewicz and Śpiewak 2019). As scholars have noted, self-provisioning is not necessarily related to coping with poverty (Smith and Jehlička 2013; Spilková 2017; Bachórz 2018). Neither is it unanimously politically mute: despite a lack of representation in most parliaments, there are examples of “back-to-land” movements across Eastern Europe, or even of smallholders increasingly engaging in national politics and international movements, most notably with Via Campesina, an international organization of peasants aimed at advancing local and regional food sovereignty goals (Velicu and Ogrezeanu 2022).

Countering trends toward consolidation and intensification of agricultural production, there are also signs of smallholder intensification across the region (Kuns 2017; Piras et al. 2021). These developments underscore a particular positionality of smallholder farmers as capable agents of change and thus exceeding functionalist and/or poverty-reductionist readings of their roles (Blumberg 2021). Among the many dimensions of smallholder agriculture in Eastern Europe, sustainability politics is a key arena in which farmer livelihoods have unfolded (Kovács 2021; Kopczyńska 2020; Pungas 2020). Small-scale and family farms in the region play a central role in maintaining low-impact agricultural landscapes. Only recently have such environmental labors been acknowledged as contributing to resilience, multifunctionality, and biodiversity of rural ecologies.¹³ Greenwashing critiques of the current policies notwithstanding, such views are suggestive of changes in how Eastern European smallholders are viewed in Europe’s bureaucracies. Despite this discursive recognition, neither the new CAP nor the European Green Deal promises meaningful change to better support smallholders, as the broader and better-funded arms of the CAP remain geared toward supporting unsustainable consolidation and financialization of land and agriculture.

To take a long view of these developments, the push toward neoliberalization of agricultural politics in the EU has had profound negative consequences for Eastern European smallholders, and for rural communities in general. Despite decades of disinvestment and marginalization, it is also clear that they have secured a foothold in the regional food economy and have roles to play in any efforts toward sustainability.

The war in Ukraine poses considerable challenges and dangers to the “slow sustainability” culture of Eastern European countries and the long-term survival of family farms. Besides the issues detailed above, additional dangers stem from the “shock” policies typically encouraged and adopted during times of crisis and war, whereby protectionist investment and land acquisition regulations are slackened for the purpose of encouraging capital inflows to the region. These not only tempt local sellers of land but also price out potential local buyers. Further, farmers are incentivized to farm more intensively to make up for predicted crop shortfalls through national-level crop export bans and increasingly nationalist government rhetoric to achieve domestic “food sovereignty.” The erosion of smallholders is already a trend within the EU (Burkietbayeva and Swinnen 2018); the combination of disaster capitalism (Klein 2007) with the added pressures of refugees and uncertain cropping and harvest seasons will strongly challenge a sector that has few safeguards.

A further challenge is a temporal one: in the EU we are currently at the beginning of a CAP financing cycle to farmers. This offers both an opportunity for rapid public policy intervention in the form of incentives, as well as a risk that farmers decide to break previous land use agreements and elect to farm more intensively for the coming years. This may result in higher crop yields but will potentially undo years of greening that have led to some biodiversity gains. As greening and generational renewal are key goals of the new CAP cycle (together with the digitalization of agriculture), it is urgent to design incentives and broader support structures that make possible farms’ takeovers by a new generation of smallholders so that they may continue practices of food provisioning and distribution locally.

Understanding the complex smallholder agri-food system in Eastern Europe is impossible without recognizing the role of horizontal ties linking producers, urban and rural consumers, traders, local shopkeepers, farmers’ market sellers, tractor and car repair shops, veterinary offices, and many other agents involved in the making and moving of food. This network combines formal and informal arrangements; it is as complex as it is agile, ranging from sales in the smallest of farm stands and deliveries to the largest retail chains and food-processing plants. The units of production are just as diverse: they include both kin and close friendship networks as well as multigenerational family members or single, often women-led, households (Kuns 2017; Roger 2014; Piras et al. 2021; Varga 2017). Once such an intricate system is broken or disrupted, it can be restored only with difficulty, if at all.

Tapping directly into such food networks, current volunteering efforts to refugees in Poland (and beyond) become an ecology of diverse forms of organization and activities. As we have shown, volunteering is uneven, often unjust, grossly underfunded, and stretched to its limits: on April 23, 2022, Warsaw’s mayor announced that the city’s infrastructures are at full capacity after the population grew by 20 percent in less than two months (Higgins 2022). And yet, as many observers have noted, Polish and other neighboring countries’ societies continue to operate in ways that show remarkable if uneven resolve. Informality with all its inefficiencies and human tolls continue to provide a safety net, at least this early in the war. As of this writing, there are signs of bottom-up coordination and institutionalization of volunteering networks in Poland. The process of collective learning has led to hybrid forms of civic action, or a mixture of bottom-up informal actions and an attempt to develop more stable and better-managed forms (Simsa 2017). In light of the ongoing debates around the possibilities of political organization (Graeber and Wengrow 2021), it is suddenly possible to imagine that these structures and tools (volunteers’ networks, digital tools, knowledge, etc.) might create pathways for continued civil engagement and meaningful political change.

In this essay we have tried to tackle popular misperceptions of the broader Eastern European region as “backward” or left behind, and/or as belonging predominantly to Russia’s sphere of influence. With more than 180 million residents, Eastern Europe is more populous than Germany and France combined, and more populous than Russia itself. Assuming any regional dependency on or orbit around Russia—or even the EU-15—not only deprives residents of this diverse region of their political self-determination, rights, and complex agencies (Jehlička et al. 2018) but has led to misguided international interventions that have undermined its agricultural systems, with far-reaching consequences. Efforts to “modernize” agriculture through top-down funding schemes to consolidate land and to overhaul and mechanize farming, making farmers dependent on expensive machines and inputs without local sourcing or maintenance options, are a case in point. Similarly, World Bank and other international efforts to commercialize agriculture ended up squeezing smallholders even further. These processes also undermined food sovereignty goals at local and regional levels (Varga 2019).

More broadly, the crisis amplifies already existing problems that have plagued the regional agricultural sector for decades. How states are dealing with the current situation cannot be isolated from their overall geopolitical strategy vis-a-vis the EU. In fact, for some governments, the decision to deal with the crisis on their own is deliberately political and meant to reinforce resistance to EU pressure in other areas, such as a bloc-wide migration policy or rule-of-law measures and oversight. There is also a need to acknowledge the extent to which agricultural policies have failed many across the EU. European governments’ uncoordinated, inefficient, and wasteful efforts often lack long-term or systematic planning, making everyone more precarious; EU incentives have not been advantageous for the smallest, most biodiverse farms.

In this context, informality remains an important and necessary strategy against state inefficiencies or inadequate regulatory systems, if horizontal networks and small-scale farming are to remain alive and central to food security in the region. Current international trade embargoes and difficulties in transport and supply links highlight the advantages of local-scale supply chains and household subsistence practices. These grassroots activities not only deserve greater attention and fostering but may serve as an instrumental insight into re-seeding similar practices and values elsewhere. Just as bottom-up support responses to refugees have arisen from within civil society in the region, such localized dynamics can tap into local capacities and sustainabilities. These could be creatively merged with more institutionalized or vertical approaches to food policy, providing a holistic “safety net.” The current events provide an opportunity to appreciate Eastern Europe, and primarily its rural areas, not as a test-bed for policy interventions tailored for different contexts, or as a region that needs to develop and “learn,” but as a source of unique, embedded practices around growing and distributing fresh food that has proven resilient. Moreover, the experiences from this area may inspire new initiatives toward imagining alternative political futures.