Serious defeat for the district of Barnim and the large agrarians (04.01.2011)

 

Short­ly before Christ­mas, the Barn­im dis­trict filed a dou­ble legal dis­pute against the Asso­ci­a­tion of Friends of the Ger­­man-Pol­ish Euro­pean Nation­al Park Unteres Oder­tal e. V. (Nation­al Park Asso­ci­a­tion) lost. With the help of the Land Move­ment Act (Grd­stVG) and the Reich Set­tle­ment Act (RSiedlG), the local Agri­cul­ture Office want­ed to exer­cise a right of first refusal in favor of the Lüder­s­dorf agri­cul­tur­al coöper­a­tive. As an agri­cul­tur­al enter­prise, the Nation­al Park Asso­ci­a­tion ini­tial­ly leased agri­cul­tur­al land and then bought what the dis­trict want­ed to prevent.

In the course of the pro­ceed­ings, the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of the Barn­im dis­trict changed. At first he had claimed that the asso­ci­a­tion did not pur­sue a prop­er, effi­cient and prof­it-ori­en­t­ed agri­cul­ture, but a hob­by and a hob­by. Then the dis­trict changed the strat­e­gy and claimed that a non-prof­it asso­ci­a­tion, even as an effi­cient and prof­it-ori­en­t­ed farmer, was not a farmer in the sense of the law, so the dis­trict could exer­cise a right of first refusal. The author­i­ties were now unsuc­cess­ful with both lines of argument. 

The los­er in the process is not only the dis­trict, but also the agri­cul­tur­al coöper­a­tive Lüder­s­dorf, which has so far reject­ed any form of col­le­gial coöper­a­tion with its neigh­bor­ing farms, rely­ing on offi­cial and polit­i­cal back­ing, and con­tin­ues to self-rule every­thing, as it did in the days of social­ism that fell twen­ty years ago would like to. Through its own fault, the agri­cul­tur­al coöper­a­tive is los­ing a con­sid­er­able amount of land and will now be unable to avoid find­ing its way back to nor­mal forms of coöper­a­tion among farmers.

The court rul­ing is also a heavy blow for the Landge­sellschaft Sach­sen-Anhalt and the Lan­des­bauern­ver­band, both lob­by­ists of the large agrar­i­ans, who want­ed to pre­vent the pri­vate nation­al park asso­ci­a­tion from estab­lish­ing itself as a new agri­cul­tur­al set­ter, acquir­ing land and apply­ing for fund­ing. This unpleas­ant com­pe­ti­tion should be elim­i­nat­ed from the start, an attempt that has thor­ough­ly failed.

The court deci­sion should give the State Office for Rur­al Devel­op­ment, Agri­cul­ture and Land Man­age­ment (LELF) pause for thought, and thus the direct­ly super­or­di­nate Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture and its depart­ment head, Hans Rüdi­ger Schu­bert. The state office and indi­rect­ly also the min­istry have tried unsuc­cess­ful­ly to pre­vent the asso­ci­a­tion from set­ting up new farms. Instead, the court held that a rec­on­cil­i­a­tion between agri­cul­ture and nature con­ser­va­tion, as prac­ticed by the asso­ci­a­tion, is a goal of Ger­man agri­cul­tur­al pol­i­cy that deserves protection.

The deci­sion of the dis­trict court is liv­ing proof of a func­tion­ing con­sti­tu­tion­al state, on which the con­cen­trat­ed pow­er of the agri­cul­tur­al lob­by in Bran­den­burg ulti­mate­ly failed. Now all those involved are well advised to accept the judg­ment and find their way back to a sen­si­ble, equal togeth­er­ness. Wher­ev­er it finds coöper­a­tive part­ners, the asso­ci­a­tion will con­tin­ue to lease its land pri­mar­i­ly to local farm­ers, albeit under nature con­ser­va­tion require­ments. His own organ­ic farm will remain a sideline.

Dr. Ans­gar Vössing
Deputy CEO