Intense Drought Adds to Woes of Serbian Farmers

In the fertile Vojvodina plain, which straddles the Danube River and once fed much of southeastern Europe, wheat fields are so blanched by the sun that looking at them can blind the eye.

A thermometer at a farmhouse reads 94 degrees in the shade at 7 p.m. as Djordje Curcin, wearing only shorts and sandals, takes shelter after a 14-hour harvest day in a dry, punishing wind.

Growers of Serbia’s most valuable export are struggling this season just to feed the home market, and the odds against them have rarely been worse.

Bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization throughout the spring last year hit Serbia’s factories, reducing supplies of the fuel and fertilizer that farmers needed for sowing last fall. Winter floods and the paltry price paid by the government for last season’s wheat also worked against an adequate crop this time.

To make matters worse, this year’s crop is stunted by the Balkan region’s worst drought in nearly half a century, one that has kept most of Serbia without rain for two months.

The drought is bad news for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, as he tries to shore up a war-battered economy and his own odds of survival in the face of parliamentary and municipal elections that probably will be held late this year.

The 8 million people in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic, depend far more on bread for daily nutrition than do most other European populations. Producing the bread that Serbs eat and seeding the next crop requires about 2.3 million tons of wheat per year.

Before harvesting began this week, agricultural economists in Serbia estimated that the crop would fall short of that target by 200,000 to 700,000 tons. With little hard currency for wheat imports, predictions of hunger have surfaced in the Serbian press.

“We’re just one step away from a humanitarian catastrophe,” declared Radomir Popovic, an agricultural specialist in Belgrade, the Serbian and Yugoslav capital.

Serbian Agriculture Minister Jovan Babovic insists that his republic has “solid reserves” that would offset a shortfall. But the highest independent estimate of those reserves is 800,000 tons, and that would leave little for wheat exports, traditionally the source of one-fourth of Serbia’s trade income.

Punished by Western sanctions that limit its flow of hard currency, Serbia barters wheat for natural gas from Russia and petroleum from Iraq, Libya and Syria. Without surplus wheat, economists say, Serbs are less certain of a winter without blackouts and fuel shortages.

The drought has devastated farms across Romania, Croatia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, prompting Christian Orthodox priests and Muslim clerics to lead open-air prayers for rain.

But farmers here complain that the main culprit for Serbia’s meager harvest is not the weather but rigid agricultural controls.

Most grain farmers own their land, but Milosevic requires them to buy fertilizer and other supplies from the state and to sell their crops to state-owned mills. For the sake of cheap bread, the state sets grain prices far below the world market and often below the farmers’ production costs; prices are announced after the growing season, not before.

“In this country there are two groups that cannot go on strike: pensioners and farmers,” said Curcin, 49, whose family has been cultivating the same land for six generations. “What would I do if I didn’t do this?”

His Polje Agrar cooperative, which manages production for 600 farmers, is in some ways a model of efficiency. His sons, Dragan and Stevica, buy junked tractors and combines at bargain prices and then travel to Greece and Hungary for spare parts.

“In a free market, we’d be extremely profitable,” said Curcin, leading a visitor to his shed to see a refurbished 1968 John Deere tractor bearing Illinois license plates. “But we face not only closed borders but also police checkpoints around our village.

“We must work under many rules and price controls,” he added, predicting another year of financial loss on his crop. “The only decree we haven’t heard about yet is one that will make it rain.”

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Boudreaux recently was on assignment in Yugoslavia.