UNMIK ON AIR

ECONOMY AS MUTUAL LINK

(By Sputnik KILAMBI and Zoran CULAFIC)

Dzevat Ahmeti: I’d like someone to come and see how we live. Till today it’s always been like that – before elections, they come for a day, just passing by promising everything but not a single one has kept his promises. That’s what pisses me off the most, to hear promises and then to see nothing fulfilled. How can these people sit in their chairs saying that they help people while never keeping their promises?

Dzevat Ahmeti, a 43-year-old farmer from the village of Oraovica, near Presevo in southern Serbia explaining the problems farmers face in his village. Problems, he insists, that bypass the ethnic divide and affect both communities alike – Serbs and Albanians.

Hello and welcome to UNMIK ON AIR .

Dzevat Ameti is an ethnic Albanian but prefers to introduce himself as a farmer who wants to live and raise his family with the sweat of his own brow. A recent visit to a collective farm near Segedin in Hungary, which brings together more than 500 farmers, was an inspiring one, he says. Only decades ago, these farmers too were poor and unorganized, but today the huge difference is obvious.

Dzevat Ameti: We were surprised how they succeeded and I understand what the secret is – a firm determination to work, support from the municipal institutions and from the state, and the most important – support from yourself (in the sense that you see that your work is worthy earning money.) All their produce is sold on the European market through an organized purchase center.

Both Serb and Albanian farmers from Presevo made the trip to Segedin, a visit organized by a local collective farm in Horgos, a village of some 1.000 inhabitants in Vojvodina, close to the Hungarian border.

Peter Mojzes is part of the Horgos collective farm and heads a local NGO – Centre for the Development of Agribusiness. His farm supplies the green market with around 30.000 tons of fresh vegetables and fruits a year. According to Peter Mojzes, mutual trust and cooperation is the key to success.

Peter Mojzes: If you have the will and the motivation you’d start with “small goals”. I think the best solution is to start with small joint economic projects – artificial irrigation for example … you cannot have one farmer able to irrigate his vineyard and the other one not. That’s what mutual interest means, and the right to use the water is common to all. When you have such economic goals then you forget your ethnic origin and everyone gains from that.

For the farmers from southern Serbia, farms in the Hungarian town of Segedin were an eye-opener. Dzevat Ahmeti describes in glowing terms the flourishing cattle and poultry farms he saw in Hungary. But it was the huge wine cellar in Segedin that impressed him the most.

Dzevat Ahmeti: The owner of that wine cellar has 150 hectares of vineyards and there was a clear reason why he joined the collective farm – now he produces and exports wine exclusively for Italy, Italian Riesling. That encouraged me to think that we too could work and join collective farms because we saw that it works, that there is profit to be made and that agricultural technology can be improved.

Dzevat Ahmeti also has warm words for the mayor of Segedin, who spent time with the visiting group and joined them for a few hours at the collective farms. He can’t remember the last time a politician had as much time for them in Presevo.

Dzevat Ahmeti: We miss such behavior here. We do not have such relations and support from our municipal institutions. To tell you frankly, we haven’t seen the kind of smile that we saw on the face of the mayor of Segedin when he was with ordinary farmers there. We cannot expect such smiles from our municipal representatives here.

Trust and cooperation are vital for sustainable development stresses Petar Mojzes and calls on the media to help build this trust by adopting a more balanced approach in their reporting.

Interethnic relations are fine in Horgos, he says, despite the unequal ethnic mix here - more than 85 % are Hungarian, around 10 % Roma and Serbs represent only 3-5 %. The point is that all communities have put their mutual economic interest first.

Ethnic barriers will crumble, he thinks if people are allowed to travel and meet other people.

Petar Mojzes: My stance is that problems are mutual. A Roma here cannot solve a problem without the help of his neighbors and vice versa. We all have to deal with good and bad. A gentleman said he realized how hard the people in Hungary work and yet they don’t have multi-storey houses or luxury cars. He saw that a farmer who breeds two and half thousand geese on his farm drives a Wartburg car. Then that gentlemen realized that people spend a lot of money on cement, bricks, and things like that but did not invest in an essential thing – in inter-human relations between themselves, between neighbors and other nations, as well as neighboring countries.

Dzevat Ahmeti agrees – the farmers in Presevo have much to learn from their counterparts in Vojvodina and Hungary.

Dzevat Ahmeti: The experience from such trips has encouraged me in the belief that farmers here are diligent too, they are good workers and they do wish to produce, and it is not hard for them to produce larger quantities. The main problem is the lack of a market for them to sell their products. We saw how it functions when everything is in order, from producing to selling prices are correct. We too would like to produce like that, to establish such a system here.

And he is not alone in that. Fellow farmers in Presevo, Serb and Albanian are eager to pool their resources. The Vojvodina collective is also at their service to help them achieve that goal.

And that brings us to an end of this edition of UNMIK ON AIR. Thanks for listening.