By Prof. James MACE , Consultant to The Day
The Day Weekly Digest in English
Kyiv, Ukraine, Tuesday, February 24, 2004

The more attractive young ladies of twelve to fifteen years or so might always find a place in the market for white slaves in Turkey or some such place to be sold over and over. Their male cousins, without any urban skills and precious little cash, might in turn try to sell their services as guards or policemen against those not so fortunate as they and thus forced into thieving for a living, so that half of the male villagers might be employed to chase the other half.

Meanwhile their elders will go around searching for cardboard, newspapers, and empty beer bottles that they can exchange for a crust of bread the way urban pensioners now do. Is this social justice?

This writer's late lamented father-in-law was able to turn collective farms into millionaires in Galicia, where the soil is not as good as in much of Ukraine, without much schooling to his credit. Of course, he never figured out that being the head of a collective farm was for most in that position a synonym for stealing, and somebody else always came after him and squandered the money he had accumulated within the next few months. They once even offered to make him a hero of socialist labor in exchange for two breeding sows. He refused and was put on pension literally the next day.

Without the broadest possible help to those attempting to try their hand at private farming away from the former kolhosp chairman kleptocrat, still the cock of the walk in most villages, giving those without money or power the dubious right to sell their land to those who have both is just plain wrong.

One of Ukraine's comparative advantages in this world is good soil. Let those who learned how from their forefathers farm it, and this country will feed much of the world to the benefit of all who live here. Let those who have made their careers exploiting those who grow the grain go to Turkey or some such place where their nether parts can be sold for whatever they might be worth. I think it will not be much.