Thirty years in power – and the only fulfilled promise: the collective farms survived. Everything else that Lukashenko swore to do for the Belarusian village either did not happen or turned into a disaster. This is reported by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine.
70% of Belarusian agricultural enterprises cannot operate without constant state subsidies. The profitability of grain production fell from 71% in 1995 to less than 10% in 2020. The debts of the agricultural sector to banks exceed the annual volume of its production by a fifth. Over twenty years, the state has invested $100 billion in the industry and received collective farms with a profitability of 4.7%, compared to farms, which without any preferences show 21.4%.
Lithuania, with a population three times smaller, exports food worth $8 billion against Belarus’s $10 billion. Lithuanian yields increased from 19 quintals per hectare in 1992 to 47 in 2020. Belarus, during the same time, with billion-dollar investments and loud programs, reached 43 – and only last year, and only as an exception.
The rural revival program, which Lukashenko launched in 2005, promised Belarusians a new quality of life: infrastructure, schools, sports clubs. Twenty years later, state television reported on a warm toilet in a house, presenting it as an achievement. A check in 2016 found that 130 of the 300 inspected agro-towns had empty houses. They were built – but no one wanted to live there.
Meanwhile, the village simply disappears. 1,800 settlements have been erased from the map of Belarus over thirty years. The rural population decreased from 3.2 million to less than 2 million people. Those employed in the agricultural sector number 236,000, while in the early 1990s there were about a million. A third of those who remain are pensioners. In 2023, 13,000 children were born in the countryside, and 37,000 people died.
