Poland's town/country divide explored

Maybe my genes have been urban too long - my paternal grandfather Tomasz worked behind the counter at PKO before the war - urban and rural are quite different. But then his wife came from Mogielnica, a small country town in the rural south of Mazowsze. Am I, with my tendency to philosophise, the product of urban life, urban breeding, imbued with urban behaviour and thinking? City life, plenty of time for reflection?

Those differences seep out into politics and culture, and in a different way than in England.

Out here in Jakubowizna, most of my immediate neighbours are Warsaw folk with a weekend foot in countryside. But the neighbourhood itself is mainly working farms - orchards interspersed with strawberry plantations. 

Being a farmer is a full-time job. Yesterday evening, on my walk, returning home to my działka after sunset, I still could hear tractors working the fields. The sound of power tools is always in the air, even during the weekend; Jakubowizna is busy. The farms are well managed; run-down orchards get sold and consolidated into larger holdings that make more sense commercially. 

Farm folk are no-nonsense people; there's no time for fretting about transsexuals' rights or black lives in distant America. The here and now is tending the crops in the field and getting the harvest to market. This is reflected in the politics. Posters ahead of the presidential elections in southern Mazowsze are mostly for the PSL candidate Kosiniak-Kamysz or incumbent Duda; today I did actually see two posters for urban Poland's choice, Trzaskowski. [Ahead of the 2015 elections, the only posters I saw on my motorbike rides through rural Mazowsze were for Duda, so it's telling that this time the rural vote seems more split out here.]

In rural Mazowsze, lifestyles and diets are different. Faces are fatter, bodies larger. There's no time for the gym (there are no gyms), there's physical work to be done. Women in the fields, bent double as they pick strawberries (few Ukrainians this year), are rushing to get the crop in at the optimal time to get the best price. Men are sitting on tractors, spraying the fruit trees.

Below: wooden church, horse-drawn harrow. Tradition lives strong in the country.

And for the hard-working, for those upon whom fortune and the weather have smiled, the rewards are there to be displayed. Principally, the home; big, new, with a well-mown lawn and gravel drive; double garage containing a 'hack' (typically a 20-year-old Golf or Corolla) for driving to the shops, and a new black SUV for turning up to church in (even though the church is 400m away). Holidays - Poland; foreign muck being inedible and foreigners being a shifty lot who speak no Polish. Foreign holidays is for urban Poland.

Other than field patterns (the result of not having primogeniture), the main difference between the Polish and English countryside is the latter's historical distance from modern urban Britain. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1760s, and by the mid-1860s, the percentage of Britons living in cities was similar to that in Poland now. Two-fifths of all Poles live in the countryside (wieś - literally 'the village'); in Britain it's one-fifth. However - the composition of rural dwellers in the two countries is significantly different. In Poland, it's still people working the land. In the UK, there are many people who've made their money in the cities and have moved to the countryside for peace and quiet - or retirement in an attractive cottage-style residence. Real farmers in the UK are far fewer than in Poland. British farms are much larger; they are commercial enterprises, highly mechanised. Poland is quickly moving that way too. Land ownership has become consolidated, farm sizes are growing.

The Covid-19 revolution will generate a shift from city life to countryside; if you can work from home, why work in a city-centre flat, at higher risk of infection, if you can work from a cottage in the countryside? If the attractions of urban living - cinemas, theatres, restaurants, clubs, bars - are suddenly considered unsafe - the choice to move out of town becomes compelling.

Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave (1980) foresaw the Information Age eclipsing the Industrial Age, which in turn pushed aside Agriculture (the first wave - the transformation of mankind from hunter-gatherer to farmer). But agriculture is as essential as industry. Having an inverse pyramid with too many information-age workers doing clever service-sector things on computers, with not enough food coming off the fields and too few products leaving an economy's factories is a danger. Britain faces that danger. The shift from agriculture to industry happened quickly and early on; a similar shift is taking place away from industry towards services. Britain is over-reliant on services, and Brexit won't help.

Poland, on the other hand, has a healthier mix, with agriculture producing more than three times the value added to its GDP compared to the UK (2.1% / 0.6%). In the case of industry and construction, Poland is also ahead (28.6% / 17.5%). The rest of both nations' economies are made up of the service sector. Has the UK strayed too far from the basics - growing food, making things and putting up buildings?

I am glad Poland hasn't turned its back on the land nor on manufacturing. A more balanced economy is more sustainable and more resilient.

This time five years ago:

A long walk to Czachówek

This time six years ago:
Half a mile under central Warsaw, on foot

This time seven years ago:
Dzienniki Kołymskie reviewed

This time eight years ago
Russia-Poland in Warsaw: the worst day of Euro 2012

This time ten years ago:
Thirty-one and sixty-three - a short story

This time 11 years ago:
Warsaw rail circumnavigation

This time 12 years ago:
Classic Polish vehicles

This time 13 years ago:
South Warsaw sunsets