Rural supply, rural demand

Out on the działka,  my nearest shops are in Chynów. There's a Mirabelka and a Top Market to choose from. Despite being located right in the heart of the garden of Poland, there's a dearth of local agricultural produce on sale. I was amazed to see Top Market selling fruit from South America, North Africa and the Far East, yet very little from Powiat Grójecki, our county.

Chynów has no farmers' market. If you open Targeo.pl, you'll find that all Chynów can offer is 'sprzedaż przydrożna' - roadside sales. Every Saturday, a number of pop-up stalls appear on the top end of ulica Wolska next to Top Market's car park, selling clothes, shoes and household goods.

At first sight it's odd that living in the Polish countryside, one cannot easily source local products from a local shop. If I want spinach, I have to buy Hortex-brand frozen spinach; even in season neither Mirabelka nor Top Market sell leafy fresh spinach. I can, however, buy leeks, nice tomatoes (malinowe - the best) and potatoes, but little more. No herbs in pots, no seasonal asparagus, no bundles of fresh szczypiorek...

Meanwhile in Warsaw (in particular in big suburban hypermarkets), the selection of food stuffs is mind-bogglingly huge. Whatever you want, in or out of season, local or exotic, you can find it easily. Why is it that agricultural products gravitate to the cities, whilst being unavailable in the places they are grown?

A simplistic answer is that this is due to an imbalance in the supply chain, caused by changing market demand, changing demographics and the response of the big retailers and wholesalers.

Agriculture in Poland is reshaping itself around the demands of modern retail. Here in Jakubowizna, my neighbours who are running efficient orchards have learned exactly what to do to maximise yields and crop quality, and get top zloty for their apples. Yet the left-behinds, who have not invested in manageable orchards, irrigation, crop protection or machinery, and still grow traditional apple varieties rather than those wanted by the supermarkets, are failing to make ends meet.

Beauteous apples destined for the tables of Warsaw

The gulf between rich farmer and poor farmer is opening up quickly. The former are buying up failed orchards, and consolidating them into ever-larger acreages, making it easier to negotiate directly with the buyers. But in the medium to long term, this will lead to falling biodiversity, lost varieties and an ever greater dependence on agrichemicals.

There is an answer. It is for small farmers to go organic and go local. But this needs a greater degree of organisation and sophistication than they can generally muster. Technology has part of the answer, using the tools and apps of e-commerce to make it easier to connect local grower with local buyer.

There is a demand. Everyone who has tasted the apples from my old trees says that while they look far worse than the perfectly uniform jabłka deserowe from the supermarket, they do have a taste which takes them back to childhood - and they are guaranteed 100% free of chemicals. But no supermarket buyer would ever buy apples as blemished as mine. And here's the problem.

It's not just about apples, potatoes, carrots and berries. Locally made cheese and sausage (kiełbasa) is starting to make its way to the big cities, where urban sophisticates give such artisan fare pride of place on their tables when entertaining, along with premium Polish wines. Again, the supply chains run one way - from field to the cities' forks. Na wsi there's little demand for a good, mature goats cheese, fine poultry-liver patés or gamey kabanos made from wild-boar meat. Certainly, the convenience-store chains, whose networks are penetrating deeper and deeper into the countryside, have no mechanism for dealing with individual producers at the local level. For them it's easier to sell packaged cheese slices and generic smoked-meat products from the big players. Add sliced-white toasting loaves, frozen vegetables, beer, vodka and cigarettes, and you have a reliable business model that ticks over nicely right across Central and Eastern Europe.

But it doesn't help the several hundred thousand Polish smallholders who are just a step up from subsistence level.

Technology can play a part. Imagine an app which tells you where the nearest 'wild' orchard is, what traditional varieties of fruit you can find there, and how much a kilo costs if you pick it yourself. Enter the orchard, switch on the GPS-enabled app, the farmer can see you're there, you pick as much as you need, and you pay the farmer directly to their online bank account.

But here's a scheme already up an running, founded by an old friend from Polish Saturday school and from the legendary Błękitna Trójka scout troop, Rafał Serafin. The film's in Polish, but it explains how local food from local producers is ending up on local tables. The pilot project is being replicated, but it needs to scale up to become a systemic solution for left-behind rural Poland. As Rafał says, subsistence farming in Poland is on a scale that tips elections. Read about the EU-funded Prosto od rolnika ('straight from the farmer') project in English as well as in Polish here.

 

Initiatives such as Koszyk lisiecki and Wiejska e-skrzynka have a big part to play in the EU's Green Deal, to spur recovery after the economic battering that Covid has delivered. This is win-win-win-win. Win for local producers who can get their food directly to consumers, cutting out the middleman. Win for local consumers, who get access to a wider choice of quality fare, produced locally. A win for the environment; less transport, less fumes and traffic. And a win for society, as an entire swathe of the population is lifted out of rural poverty (and thus less likely to vote for populists selling answers that sound simple but are wrong).

Rafał is looking for crowdfunding for a documentary film that will show how to get there in practical steps. One target group that he identifies is the children of smallholders, many of whom emigrated to the UK seeing few prospects for themselves in rural Poland. Rafał wants to make them think of the family farm as an investment opportunity with potential - and offers them a route map to do it.

To see how it works, click here and chip in, I already have.

This time last year:

Progress on the Radom line

[I'm amazed how much has been done in the past 12 months, especially given Covid! Czachówek-Warka is nearly ready, still much work to be done on the Chynów station passenger tunnel.]

This time two years ago:
Down with this sort of thing! Kler, reviewed.

This time four years ago:
Britain's Conservatives turn their backs on economic liberalism

This time seven years ago:
Goodnight Dżerzi - Janusz Głowacki's book reviewed

This time nine years ago:
More serious setbacks on Second Metro line construction 

This time ten years ago:
Leonard Cohen in Katowice

This time 12 years ago:
The short-term future of suburban development (How right I was!)