Poland: the great hunger
Tim Garton Ash
Berlin It is a proud, romantic Catholic nation. Its tragic history of oppression by powerful neighbours stretches back centuries. The scroll of popular rebellions is as long. It won its independence after the First World War, through native valour aided by the constellation of international politics, although it was forced to accept the exclusion of a small enclave territory around a vital port in the north. Its people are among the most charming in the world: warm, spontaneous, convivial, superstitious and bibulous. In the south you can still occasionally hear the peasants singing their ballads about America, that promised land whither SO many of their forebears have gone—there to become the butts of vulgar humour. Streetlamps burn through half the daylight hours. Walls are plastered with posters demanding the release of political prisoners. Turning a corner in the capital you suddently come upon a small knot of people engaged in feverish debate — the street theatre of revolution. Just 50 yards down the road small girls file into church for their first communion, simpering behind white muslin veils. You assume we speak of Poland? How easily you could be right. Every word of this description fits that country like a glove. Every image could be drawn from Poland in the last year.
But in fact we speak of Ireland. That vital northern port is not Gdansk but Belfast. e description comes from Micheal Mac Liammoir.The street theatre of revolution! experienced before the general post office In O'Connell Street, Dublin, a few weeks ago. A young IRA man, a staring, unshaven Character, strongly reminiscent of Amos in Cold Comfort Farm, tried to sell me a lapel badge: 'British out of Ireland'. He fingered a copy of the 'Writings of Bobby Sands', got like a breviary, with an application to Join the Provisional Sinn Fein in the place Where the blessing should be. And where do you come from ?' he asked, after delivering a long sermon about the leaders of the Easter Uprising and how they had been 'murdered by the English."London'. I felt like a man in the middle of a Solidarity meeting in Warsaw. Fortunately, Amos thought I looked like that, too. 'I don't believe you,' he exclaimed, 'you've a touch of Continental.' A touch of Continenlike a touch of 'flu. Nearby a girl's voice issued from a tape-recorder, singing a ballad about Charles Haughey's'Betrayal of the Brave' to the air of 'Carrigdoun'. The text Which lies before me as I write exhorts: Let history write it clear and bold This day our country has been sold Charlie's work for England done Our Dermot McMurrough of Eightyone Dermot Mc-who? The ballad-writer, one Joe Stagg, clearly assumes his audience will know that Dermot McMurrough was the king of Leinster in the 12th century. Only in Poland have I encountered such a tremendous popular sense of national history. This is not the least attractive of the many qualities which the two nations have in common.
It was therefore no surprise to find people collecting money for 'the Pope's country' in the middle of O'Connell Street. `No potatoes, no butter, no milk, no meat . . . proclaimed their sandwichboards, and generations of Irishmen know in the pit of their national stomach what that means. Even 20 years ago it would have been hard to imagine the Irish giving large quantities of food to other countries. They were still among the given to rather than the givers. That has changed now. Ireland's new prosperity is most visible in the rash of more or less hideous new detached bungalows which have broken out across its countryside. Eire as a land of plenty, partly because its free economy has allowed native enterprise to combine fruitfully with foreign capital, but chiefly because it has been a major beneficiary of the Common Market's agricultural policy. Meanwhile, Poland is hungry. The monthly meat ration has been decreased to just 3 kilos per head. In some places even that cannot be guaranteed. People queue for up to 15 hours for basic foodstuffs. Hunger was the engine behind the massive demonstration which blocked Marszalkowska (Warsaw's O'Connell Street) for two days last week. Hunger brought 100,000 women onto the streets of Lodz. Hunger threatens to break the extraordinary self-restraint which has been exercised by the Polish people, under the guidance of Solidarity, since last August. It is almost a miracle that there has been no serious rioting or looting already.
Who is to blame for the hunger? To be sure, the fact that little work has been done in many Polish factories for many months has not helped. 'What is the difference between working and being on strike?' asks a self-critical Polish joke. Answer: 'On strike you don't drink'. Apart from drinking, many Poles are now obliged to waste many of their working hours queueing for food. The consequent loss of production means the state has less goods to export to earn the hard currency to pay for the imported food to feed the workers. It is a vicious circle.
But why is Poland importing food anyway? This fertile agricultural country should be at the very least self-supporting, like Ireland. The catastrophic state of Polish agriculture is simply and solely the result of 30 years of Communist misrule. We have illustrated in these pages how, particularly in the last decade, the government has systematically discriminated against private farmers, requisitioning their land for hopeless state farms in which foreign capital is squandered, denying them the machinery and fertilisers they desperately need, and giving them such a rotten price for their meat that they no longer think it worth breeding pigs for the market. The national stock of pigs was depleted by two and a half million in the last five years. The examples could be multiplied.
It is not difficult to imagine how prosperous Poland could be if, like Ireland, it had been in a position to remain neutral through the Second World War: if after the War if had been given a free market instead of a command economy: if the foreign capital which flowed so abundantly into the country in the last decade had been put to good use: and if it, too, had enjoyed so amply the benefits of Common Market membership.
Today the workers' and peasants' Solidarity organisations are doing what they can. In one agricultural machinery plant near Poznan, for example, the labour-force decided to work on their work-free Saturday (a concession which was only won in January) and themselves to arrange the supply of the extra machines to private farmers selected by rural Solidarity.
General Jaruzelski's new government which, unlike most of its predecessors, is composed largely of men who have some professional competence, is also doing what it can. But the best will and the best government in the world cannot reconstitute two and a half million pigs overnight. A good harvest may give them a short breathing space. Yet the demonstrations of the last few weeks — which Solidarity has been restraining, not inciting — have shown that meat and butter must be brought into the shops now, and kept in supply through the winter, if an explosion of popular fury is to be averted. Such an explosion would have unforeseeable consequences. It might yet precipitate (or provide a plausible pretext for) aSoviet invasion. If the West can supply this food, then both the Warsaw government and the Kreinlin have one less excuse.
That is the admirable logic behind the French government's decision to send 300,000 tonnes of grain, 7,000 tonnes of beef and 15,000 tonnes of sugar by special airlift to Warsaw, 'immediately'. It should inspire the EEC to speed up the delivery of the 400,000 tonnes of foodstuffs promised in December but since bogged down in a bureaucracy which sometimes functions little better than Poland's own. And perhaps it would be fitting, in the light of his country's experience, if Mr Garret Fitzgerald could urge on the Community the wisdom — and the humanity — of further, rapid, large-scale transfers from Western Europe's milk lakes and butter mountains to the Ireland of Eastern Europe.
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