Happening everywhere.
A few months ago, I went on a trip to the far north-east of Hungary with a friend and two of her friends. We stayed at the place of another friend, an environmentalist who lived in a self-renovated farmstead in an absolutely idyllic village there. We went there because of the nearby caves, but the whole area is now a national park, and wandering there is beautiful.
When we were driving through the area back out to Miskolc/Eger the next day, I told the guy that it struck me that the rare folk we saw on the street were all old. Weathered-looking and old. In concise, business-like manner, he proceeded to sketch a birds eye overview of a tragedy with farcical elements. I made notes some time, but I cant find them back, so this is by heart; forgive me if I make stupid mistakes, I know nothing of agriculture. This was the general drift:
Basically, the small Hungarian farmers, he said (and there's a lot of them, there's even a Party of Smallholders that was a major player in the early 90s, and back in the 40s had half the vote), are dying out - or soon will be.
They work on small plots, with relatively sobre machinery. They cannot compete with the products that, since the end of communism, are imported from mass farms in the West (in massive, polluting road transport, natch).
Much of those imports comes from the 'old' EU countries, where farmers can produce cheaper, more solid products - thanks to massive subsidies from the state and the EU.
Hungary's own government in turn, in its understandable eagerness to get approved for EU membership, agreed in the accession negotiations to terms that accord its own farmers subsidies of a fraction of the amount their richer Western counterparts get (20% or the like).
In an area like this, all this means a total lack of prospects for the family farms. There is no other employment of note, and no higher education. There's also nothing to do: to see a movie, say, you have to go to a town three hours out. So all the young people move out. It's a self-strengthening process as no youngster wants to stay in a place where there's only old people, and the fewer young people there are, the less ground for anything to be established.
With all the young people moving out and only old folks surviving on scraggy farms or 200-250 dollar a month pensions left, there's no way to run a profitable business anymore. So all the shops have closed too. Same with post offices. You now have to travel a long way out for even the most basic services. The bus comes a few times a day.
As the young move away and the old people can not survive on their farms in the face of subsidized imports or modern competition, farmland falls fallow. This is a problem because the National Park was established to protect a landscape of meadows and farmland. So now the National Park
itself has employees harvest hay etc., at significant state expenditure. All the unmarketable harvest is then trucked to the incinerator - and destroyed. (
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The remaining old folk in the villages meanwhile, are left to depend on their extremely meagre pensions. Often, just the costs for water, heating, etc are more than what their pensions can afford. After all, under communism those things were subsidized to the point of negligeability, but now newly privatised companies sell it expensively.
In the old times, in villages where everyone knew each other, residents would be able to get things on credit at the local shop when the end of the month was near - but there's no local shops anymore.
The heating is a particular problem, as it gets pretty cold up there. The point to make here is that old Hungarian houses have traditional stone heatings - my previous apartment still had one too. Basically, its a large rectangular tower of stone in the corner of your living room; the tower is heated by gas, it becomes warm very slowly but then the stone holds the heat for a long time. So it's a very cheap, if very slow way of heating your living room.
After the fall of communism, salesmen went round the country reminding people how comfortable it would be if they could heat up their house instantly, and not just the living room. They offered cut-rate introduction prices for central heating, installed at no cost. Many Hungarians, eager to join the 20th century and naive in the ways of the market economy, bought in.
Roma tradesmen, in turn, jumped at the chance and went into the villages to buy up all the old stone heating stoves. They dissembled them, transported them to the city and sold them to the emerging middle class who wanted them in their newly bought apartments for ornamental value.
Now, the pensioners in the villages are stuck with central heating costs far beyond what they can afford - and without any fall-back option. So they just don't pay, and get into trouble - or they don't eat.
The villages, he said, are basically doomed. The only rescue potential of sorts would be what you see in the West - rich retirees from the city moving to the countryside and buying up houses. This would only bring a different kind of death, of course, pricing locals out of the market and turning original farming villages into kitsch pastiches - but it would be something. But that kind of development only comes with a certain level of prosperity, which in Hungary will take a decade or more to appear. By that time, it will be too late.
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