[...]

In the wake of the Sixties, village folk ate and drank, built with gusto and began to forget the times of privation. The well-meaning popular educator I was wanted to persuade the villagers to dance and sing and make music in the House of Culture. To strut about the stage, throw off the chains of labour. The trouble was that there were endless other things for them to attend to on burgeoning household plots and in the intoxicating atmosphere of the emergent second economy.
In the world of the co-operatives the people reserved their energies for working their private plots, and the popular educator objected to that. She would have been happier to see some kind of civic set-up that also made culture, value and identity of interests communal. She recalled with nostalgia the old traditional village (spinning room, reading circle, craftsmen’s circle, farmers’ circle) that had been wiped out by the onset of workaholism. She saw her task as being one of creating new communities that would act as seed-points for cultural values.
Then came Hungary’s transition to democracy. In the rush to privatise everything, the first casualties were workplace communities, then remote workplaces; those who were commuting long-distance to work found themselves staying at home. An era of unemployment was ushered in: there was no money and no work.
During the Nineties rural poverty kept on growing, especially in the northern, eastern and southern marches of the country. Successive governments were preoccupied with balancing their budgets, and, even in the best case, long-term plans lasted only to the end of the parliamentary cycle (and the capital’s city limits). The politicians put their faith in injections of capital and had no other prescriptions. Their other suggestion: keep your eyes peeled.
Social scientists—sociologists, statisticians, and the rest—kept us duly informed about the causes of poverty and its manifestations, but they offered no prescriptions. The powers-that-be seemed to be at a complete loss. How to redistribute, when there is so little to redistribute?
Meanwhile humanitarian-spirited civic and state bodies were operating in those parts of northern and eastern Hungary that had sunk into hopeless poverty. Some of the helpers handed out clothing, shoes and food to the needy; others offered money and loans in kind to try and stimulate the unemployed to undertake individual and collective enterprises. These gifts and puny ventures did little to cushion everyday cares. The state also had no brighter ideas than doling out subsidies to investors: what’s the point in cosying up to capital when the latter has no interest in moving to derelict regions?

Made in the developed world

Working capital might not have reached the marginal regions of Hungary by the turn of the millennium, but by then a new speciality, regional development, had come into being. This is aimed at revitalising, by means of various (internationally guaranteed) remedial tweaks, regions that had slumped into poverty and despond. An official list of the most deprived and disadvantaged districts was only put together at the end of 2007, but even before that the authorities knew, through sociological surveys and statistics, precisely which parts of the country most needed assistance.
A model programme that had been jointly worked out and financed by the Hungarian government and the United Nations Development Programme in November 2005 was initiated to come to the aid of the Cserehát, the worst-placed of all the areas in northern Hungary. Four sub-regions lying between the Aggtelek
National Park and the Zemplén Nature Reserve make up the Cserehát Programme area. There are 128 settlements with a total population of 96,000, with 80 of the villages having fewer than 500 inhabitants. Unemployment is running at two or three times the level of other parts of the country, with the proportion of registered working-age unemployed standing at over 20 per cent. According to official census data (Central Statistical Office, 2001), 16 per cent of the Cserehát’s inhabitants describe themselves as Gypsies (Roma). A government regulation issued in 2007 listed all four of the Cserehát’s constituent districts among the 33 most disadvantaged in the country.
I personally took part in the programme from March 2006 until December 2007. I was not working as a regional development officer; my task was to keep a record, as an outside observer, of what was happening within the programme. Although I visited some fifty or sixty villages and six towns within the area, I came to know less about that part of the world, but more about the behind-the-scenes realities of regional development than I would have liked.

[...]

Erzsébet Őrszigethy
is a freelance journalist, author of books on change in rural Hungary.