Negative signs in the Negev

Press, 11 September 1986, Page 20

Negative signs in the Negev

By

NICOLAS B. TATRO,

of. Associated Press, in Talme

Bilu, Israel

Israel’s independent farmers have weathered years of fickle markets and competition from communal kibbutz farms. Now, however, they appear to be losing a battle with a severe drought and soaring debts. The malaise is evident in this Negev Desert farming outpost, 100 kilometres south-east of Tel Aviv, which has not grown since it was founded in 1953 by immigrants from Iran, Turkey, and Tunisia. Fathers complain that they are unable to help their children get started and the second generation is fleeing to the city. Only 12 of 60 families still work the land. Farmers are looking to towns for work and there is bitterness against Arabs, the Government, and the more successful kibbutzim.

Some who gave up agriculture sell their annual water rights to

those still farming and let Arab sharecroppers work their land. The older generation, for whom settling the wilderness was an ideal as a way to change the image of Jews as ghetto dwellers, is disappointed with the experiment and some have directed their anger at the Arabs. “The Arabs can sell cheaper than the Jews,” said Raphael Ben Yemini, aged 49, a Kurdish Jew who emigrated from Iran in 1951. “They don’t pay taxes and their labour costs are lower because they use women and children in the field,” said Ben Yemini, whose comments triggered outbursts of agreement from other farmers and family members. Within view of the porch, Arab men wearing distinctive white headdresses and women in colourful kerchiefs and long dresses

could be seen stooping over a patch of melons on land owned by the moshav. Talme Bilu is a moshav, a semi-co-operative community, where the land is privately owned and the crops are marketed by the farmer who keeps any profit It owes SUSI. 7 million (SNZ3.S million), mostly to banks, a debt shared equally by members of the community. About 26,000 families live on the nation’s 450 moshavim. They are Israel’s small farmers, since there are few wholly private farms. The moshavim were founded by pioneers seeking to break away from the strict confines of socialist kibbutz communes, where all decisions are made collectively and there is no private property. There are 267 kibbutzim with about 115,000 residents, only slightly less than the number who live on moshavim. In recent years, kibbutz communes have been better able to change with the times, shifting

gradually from agriculture into small industries and machineintensive crops like cotton. The majority of the moshav co-operatives are healthy but about 150 are in serious trouble, according to Gedalya Gad, secre-tary-general of the co-operative farm movement. The moshavim have run up a debt of SUS32O million (SNZ6S9 million) and some will be forced to close, Mr Gad said. They are threatening national protests and strikes if the Government does not help. Sitting under a portrait of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who made settling the Negev Desert a top national priority, Mr Gad said 30 moshav co-operatives were disbanding, selling their land and water rights back to the Government. They will become independent villages without selfgoverning councils. In an interview in his Tel Aviv office, Mr Gad said he presented a bail-out plan asking the Prime

Minister, Shimon Peres, and the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency to provide SUSIOO million (SNZ2O6 million). That, coupled with SUS4O million (SNZB2.4 million) in annual aid from the Jewish Agency, could wipe out most of the short-term debt which carries annual interest rates as high as 50 per cent. "It was a combination of negative factors in a short period of time that caused this mess,” said Mr Gad, a bearded 53-year-old farmer. "It was mostly the interest rates and the fast expansion of the co-operatives,” after the Likud Government of Menachem Begin liberalised the economy in 1977, prompting small farmers to invest heavily in costly new equipment. Drought has been the catalyst for the current crisis. Ben Yemini and a neighbouring farmer Eliahu "Johnny” Gorno showed a reporter an orchard of parched fields of halfgrown artichokes, withering peach orchards, and leafless avocado trees. They will soon have to abandon peach trees and fields of artichokes because their water ration has been used up. "I won’t have any water until next April,” explained Mr Gorno, the son of a Tunisian immigrant. Negev farmers, among the worst hit, said they got 15 per cent less water from the Government this year than in 1985. Members of the Attias family in the Negev’s Nir Moshe moshav said it was the worst drought since 1961, when their dairy cattle died and they, like many other independent farmers, began experimenting with a variety of new crops. “If there is no rain this year, there will be a 50 per cent cut in. the water next year,” said David Attias, aged 29, a second-genera-tion farmer who is growing carnations. “If I don’t get enough water, I’ll have to quit farming.”' Three generations of the family which emigrated from Algeria in the 1950 s gathered under a net designed to protect flowers from the sun. It had been pressed into service the day before as a canopy for a wedding reception for their daughter, who will leave the moshav. Mr Gad said more and more moshav farmers are turning to jobs outside and about half no longer work the land. “Even if we give up farming, we will have to stay,” said David Attias’s 52-year-old mother, Malkat, herself a fanner until forced to retire because of a bad back. “We couldn’t get enough money from selling out to buy a house in the city.”