Varză, cartofi şi alţi demoni

Cabbage, Potatoes and Other Demons is the interesting account of an experiment in which Șerban Georgescu decided to become a peasant for a year. In Lunguletu he rents a plot of land that he manures and sows with cabbages and potatoes, which he harvests and sells.

Albeit with remarkable narrative levity, he reaches some dramatic conclusions. After investing 2,250 euros, in fact, he eventually earns 2,700. True, the investment yields a profit, but he fails to enter in his costs a fundamental item of his year in the fields: namely the value of his labor. The year involves a back-breaking commitment in which manual labor predominates: Șerban has to spread manure with a pitchfork, buy potatoes ready-germinated for sowing, load them onto a van, then unload them. Every potato has to be cut into three or four parts, which have to be treated and planted. The soil has to be constantly watered, meaning more hard, tiring work in which pipes have to be shifted and repositioned, and buckets filled with water from the river. Once they have been put into sacks, the potatoes are loaded onto a truck and taken to market. There the situation is dismal: hundreds of trucks and tractors heaped first with potatoes, then with cabbages, all at a standstill waiting for buyers. The farmers wait for the income from their potatoes to sow their cabbages, and the income from their cabbages to sow their potatoes. But prices are always ridiculously low, and if it is not sold the produce is destroyed.

Many jobs are done as they were in the 1950s, but there is a fundamental difference compared to the Romanian world of that time: today it’s every man for himself. Take tractors: now there’s one every 1.5 hectares of land, a very high number. Yet farmers aren’t keen on the idea of joining together and sharing costs. The experience of Ceausescu’s communism is still too fresh, and every farmer and every family want to work their own land, however meager it is. (www.eHabitat.it)