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Staying afloat in rural Serbia

December 21^st, 2020

The Mladenov family live in Dimitrovgrad, in southeastern Serbia. They make a living from their small dairy farm. Until the pandemic hit, Emilija Mladenov sold milk and cheese every morning at their local town market, and from their sale she was able to support her twins, Juliana and Jelena.

Until the pandemic hit, Emilija Mladenov sold milk and cheese every morning at their local town market, and from their sale she was able to support her twins, Juliana and Jelena.

But things have changed. First she and her husband Aleksander had to stop selling at the market, so they started going from house to house; then, the state of emergency and curfews meant they could not go out, and even when they could, most people had stopped ordering home because they did not want to risk having contact. As COVID-19 restrictions drove down prices, the family was forced to start selling milk to a local dairy at a much lower price. “We hope once this period ends, the price of milk will rise again,” Aleksander says.

Containment measures have affected agricultural operations in Serbia, interrupting food supply chains including the hospitality sector and farmer’s markets. This has left farmers and traders with limited options. Vegetable farmers on average either lost or donated 20 to 30 percent of their produce in order to avoid food waste, while many small farmers had to dispose of almost their entire production.

Many dairy farming families are in a similarly difficult position. Customers who would usually come to their house to buy milk and cheese are no longer visiting, and local agro-tourism establishments aren’t buying. Not every farmer family has a market where they can sell, especially once the lockdown restrictions limited their ability to travel, which pushed them to lower the prices of their products significantly. And as the price of their product has gone down, the cost of food for their animals has gone up.

Milko and Dusanka Andjelkov have five children aged from 10 to 19. They make and sell 20 kilogrammes of cheese a week. They don’t have a car, which prevents them from taking their product to the city markets.

Two of their children, Marta and Sasa, live in Dimitrovgrad where they go to high school. Usually on the weekends they travel back to the village to help on the farm. But when the pandemic hit Serbia, they had to stay in town. One of the best in her class, Marta recently applied for a school scholarship but was rejected because her father has a registered farm – though it’s not a large one.

There are around 113,000 unregistered farms across Serbia, and they have been left particularly vulnerable during the crisis. These farms are not eligible for government support, could not get workers during movement restrictions and their buyers were often prevented from operating. And the informal, self-employed and wage workers that often make up the rural industries are facing significant impact. Even if registered, small farms like the Mladenovs or Andjelkovs do not receive enough money for subsidies from the municipality and the state to help ease the financial pains.

A few farmers have seen business change for the better, though they are the exception. Four years ago, the Petrov family started a livestock business with seven cows in a village not far from their Dimitrovgrad home. Now, they are buying another one, after signing an agreement with a local dairy company to sell all their milk. Before the agreement, they sold milk and cheese door-to-door in the city. Their experience has been the opposite of the Andjelkovs. Not only did the COVID-19 crisis not hinder them, but their sales tripled. The only problem they faced was curfew, because the police forbade them to take their cows out for watering and grazing.

Aleksandar Manić, a shepherd in Stara Planina, on the Bulgarian border, knows the difficulties of managing animals during curfew. He tends a flock of 500 sheep with two other shepherds, covering over 20 kilometres a day. He usually takes the sheep out to feed every day. But border police are patrolling, and now he is unable to.

Aleksandar has a Masters degree in archeology from a university in Bulgaria. He trained and worked as a museum curator at the National Museum in Belgrade. But he couldn’t find peace in the city, and returned to his hometown. “I started working as a shepherd because once you spend a day with the sheep in the field, the peace you feel with them, you can’t stop doing that ever again,” he says.

Many young people are struggling to find job opportunities in Serbia, especially those in rural areas. About 60,000 people leave each year, far more than the number who return.

The OECD estimates more than 650,000 Serbians have left the country in the last two decades.

Aleksandar hasn’t visited the city since the pandemic his. He feels safer in the village. He hasn’t had much contact with people from the city, spends whole days in nature, eats only homemade food, and believes that “COVID-19 can’t come here.” He will only visit the city once the pandemic ends. “When COVID-19 is gone, I can visit my parents and some friends,” he says.

UNDP in Serbia worked on the accelerated development of new solutions and organized help where it was needed most. This included supplying the health care system, ensuring a safe and secure network of volunteers to provide support to citizens over 65 years of age - “Budi volonter” (Be a Volunteer), providing food, psychosocial support and other necessary supplies to vulnerable groups, and organizing data for online information platforms and exploring how it can be used to combat the pandemic.

UNDP’s Accelerator Lab in Serbia has been finding new sets of data to pick up emerging trends on who leaves Serbia and where they go and engaging the diaspora. UNDP supported Returning Point to map the untapped human potential that exists outside the country and create a new “one-stop” platform where the Serbian diaspora and could easily find information on the possible ways of (re)establishing contacts and connections with their country.