SUMY, Ukraine – Chickens scatter as the car comes around a curve and through a small Ukrainian village.
Ducks, geese and turkeys also head for safer ground, while goats and cows, tethered at the roadside, raise their heads and continue chewing.
Some villagers sit on benches outside their fenced yards, tending their animals or passing the time. Many offer for sale vegetables from their small backyard plots, or fish they have caught.
In nearby fields, small cattle herds graze under the watchful eye of their owners. There are no fences, and keeping tabs on the animals is a full-time job even in the misty, chilly days of late October.
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Huge livestock barns, abandoned after collective farms were dismantled, sit crumbling.
There are hundreds of small communities like this where Ukrainians live a rural lifestyle that most Canadian farmers left behind decades ago.
Many see their opportunities in the cities, not here.
“Compared to Soviet times the rural area got much poorer,” said Anatoliy Shevchenko, a livestock specialist working at the Sumy agricultural extension service.
He and other extension workers see the changes taking place as the country moves from centrally planned production to a market economy.
Livestock production was hit particularly hard.
Ukraine’s cattle herd dropped from a high of 26.7 million head in 1986 to 7.7 million in 2003, according to the United States Department of Agriculture’s foreign agricultural service.
Sheep and goats went from 9.4 million to 1.9 million and pig numbers dropped from 20 million in 1989 to 7.3 million.
Grain production was also affected, dropping as much as 50 percent in the first years of reform.
Just three years ago, in Sumy oblast located in the country’s northeast, roughly 40 percent of the agricultural land wasn’t farmed.
“Before, most people in rural areas were employed by agriculture,” said Mykhailo Martynenko, the director and crop specialist in Sumy.
“Now, because of these changes, many rural people are out of jobs.”
About a third of Ukraine’s 46 million people live in rural areas, and about half of them are of working age, said Roman Schmidt, a deputy minister of agrarian policy.
Today, large farm enterprises employ about 800,000 of those workers, he said, leaving millions of people to survive on subsistence agriculture.
Many lease their small landholdings to larger farmers and companies, but often they are paid in grain or flour, not cash.
The United Nations Development Program earlier this year said 28 percent of Ukrainians live below the poverty line of 430 hryvnia per month, or about $60 Cdn.
The same report estimated that nearly 40 percent of rural residents are poor.
Schmidt agreed there are few rural job opportunities and the hope really lies in the land.
“We try to support them, to diversify,” he said of the small landholders.
“It’s not profitable for such a small enterprise to produce grain or sugar, but vegetables, raspberries, black currants, strawberries because they are labour intensive (could support some farmers).”
Schmidt is a strong proponent of agricultural extension and Canada’s role in helping Ukraine develop such a service.
The goal is to help rural people diversify, establish co-operatives and credit unions, and attend seminars to learn about various farming methods, such as organic or no-till farming.
