BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2005

Against resistance, Belarus revives its poisoned lands

By Steven Lee Myers The New York Times

VIDUITSY, Belarus: The winter rye is already sprouting green in the undulating fields of the state cooperative farm here. The summer's crop - rye, barely and rape - amounted to 1,400 tons. Best of all, said Vladimir Pryzhenkov, the farm's director, none of it tested radioactive.

This is progress. The farm's 1,618 hectares, or 4,000 acres, are nestled among some of the most contaminated spots on earth, the poisoned legacy of the worst nuclear accident in history: the explosion at Chernobyl's Reactor No. 4 on April 26, 1986.

Almost a quarter of all of Belarus - including some of its prime farmland - remains radioactive, to varying degrees, but two decades after the catastrophe, Pryzhenkov's farm represents a part of the government's effort to put the country's contaminated land to good use.

In 2002 the checkpoints that once restricted access to this region near the Russian border - some 240 kilometers, or 150 miles, from Chernobyl - disappeared. Families began returning; some had never left; all needed jobs.

And so the farm here in Viduitsy - no longer known as the Karl Marx collective, but still state-owned - reopened two years ago, with millions of dollars worth of new harvesters and other equipment provided by the government of President Aleksander Lukashenko.

Pryzhenkov, assigned here from another farm in what he called "a promotion," has also begun breeding horses and cattle for beef - though not milk. Milk produced here would be far too dangerous for human consumption.

"This was all falling apart," he said as he drove a battered UAZ jeep over the farm's muddy, rutted roads. "There was nothing to for the people to do here."

Lukashenko, a former collective-farm boss, declared last year that it was time to revive contaminated regions.

He outlined an improbably hopeful vision of new homes and villages, of new industry, of rejuvenated farms growing peas, onions and potatoes. "Land should work for the country," he said.

Lukashenko's authoritarian decrees - on this and other topics - have prompted fear and even ridicule, but a scientific study released last month by seven United Nations agencies and the World Bank more or less agreed.

The study concluded that the aftereffects on health and the environment had not proved as dire as first predicted. It recommended that the authorities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus take steps to reverse the psychological trauma caused by Chernobyl by encouraging investment and redevelopment. Lands where agriculture was banned or severely restricted could be safe for growing crops again, though using techniques to minimize the absorption of radionuclides in food.

"It is desirable to identify sustainable ways to make use of the most affected areas that reflect the radiation hazard," the report recommended, "but also revive the economic potential for the benefit of the community."

The report's conclusions have stirred controversy. Greenpeace International denounced it as a whitewash intended to support the expansion of nuclear energy. Even a member of Lukashenko's government, Valery Gurachevsky, the scientific director of Belarus's committee on Chernobyl, called parts of the report "too optimistic."

But here in the contaminated countryside, where entire villages were left to rot amid an invisible scourge, the underlying principle is a welcome one.

Gennady Kruzhayev, 38, had just begun working on the Karl Marx collective farm when the accident occurred. He has since drifted from job to job. He drove a taxi. He pumped gas. On this day he was atop a tractor, plowing the rich black earth in preparation for next spring's sowing. "The main thing," he said, "is to have jobs."

The Chernobyl disaster spewed radioactive materials over all of Europe, but naturally the areas closest - Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, then republics of the Soviet Union - suffered the worst.

The Soviet authorities declared an emergency exclusion zone within 30 kilometers of the reactor, a circle straddling the border between Ukraine and Belarus. The zone remains closed - except to the workers overseeing the reactor's decontamination and safety, a few pensioners who have drifted back and, increasingly on the Ukrainian side, curious tourists on macabre day trips.

The contamination - particularly from caesium 137, as well as the more deadly strontium and plutonium - hardly remained within that circle, though. Areas that, to this day, are as radioactive as parts of the exclusion zone appear on maps of Belarus as irregular splashes of red across much of the eastern part of the country.

Those areas - with radiation levels exceeding 40 curies per square kilometer - remain off-limits. At least in theory, they do. All around the red spots are areas with lower levels, creating a confusing patchwork of go- and no-go zones that, by all appearances are routinely ignored.

Signs nailed to trees mark some areas. Some areas become apparent only when one notices that everything around is deserted and silent. The authorities distributed hand-held radiometers, but few people use them.

More than 130,000 Belarussians were relocated in the years after Chernobyl, but only to areas with lower levels of contamination, often only a few kilometers away. About 1.3 million Belarussians - more than a tenth of the population - live in contaminated areas, though officials say that, with certain precautions, they face little health risk.

In these areas, which suffered economic collapse, farming never stopped entirely. Instead, the state's farms adopted measures - like using calcium-based fertilizers - to minimize contamination of crops. Some crops absorb less anyway. Some that do not are used only for fodder.

Since Lukashenko came to power, the government has tried to expand agriculture in the region, removing restrictions and bans on less contaminated areas. Gennady Antsipov, who oversees reclamation for the country's Chernobyl committee, said the process was complicated and, despite Lukashenko's urgings, deliberate.

Of 2,600 square kilometers of contaminated land, only 140 square kilometers have so far been returned to active agricultural use, though in a periodic survey last year the government identified still more land that could be reclassified as less dangerous and reclaimed.

"Why should we rush this issue?" Antsipov said in an interview in the capital, Minsk. "It is like sending someone to the moon just to prove we can colonize it."

Lukashenko's government, despite its diplomatic isolation, has also worked closely with international agencies, including a program with the UN Development Fund, to improve crop yields and limit contamination of food products. All are intended to promote livelihoods in a place that, according to the recent study, suffered more from the psychological trauma of upheaval and fear than from exposure to radiation.

"We are trying to provide people a fishing rod, not a fish as we did before," Valery Shevchuk, the Chernobyl committee's deputy chairman, said.

Over time, the radioactive materials, especially caesium 137, with a half-life of 30 years, will decay, but living and working in the contaminated parts of Belarus will not soon be normal.

In Viduitsy, Pryzhenkov pointed to fields that remain too hot to grow even fodder for animals. With precautions, he says, the food grown here is safe.

The government claims to strictly check all produce; without a certificate, farmers cannot sell what they grow.

Other risks lurk in the forests and fields. Kitchen gardens - used, as in Soviet times, for subsistence - are basically unregulated. Mushrooms and berries, as well as wild game, absorb high levels of radiation. Keeping bees for honey is not considered a good idea.

Government advisories warn people not to eat these delicacies, but they do.

Vera Brausova, 73, who lives in the village Krasny Kukhani, picks mushrooms despite the warnings. Living on a pension, what choice does she have? Asked about health concerns, she said that she lived through World War II, Chernobyl and a fire that burned down the first house she was evacuated to. "What health are you talking about?" he said.

Gennady Bakhanov, the region's director of agriculture, said a healthy life in Chernobyl's shadow, as it were, depended on education and a basic precautions. "This is the trouble," he said. "It is invisible. There is no smell. This is why people act as they did before."

He drove into his native village, Samotevichy. It was abandoned.

Most of its wooden homes were buried, lest they catch fire and send radioactive particles back into the air. It is not recommended to spend prolonged periods there. He spoke wistfully of the time when the villagers might thrive again.

"Maybe in 20 or 50 years," he said, "they will come back."

Along the village's road, two men appeared. Nikolai Makarov and Vladimir Nesterenko, both in their 40s, moved back to this forsaken place a few years ago. They had been picking apples in orchards long ago abandoned.

"After a glass of moonshine," Nesterenko said, "you can eat anything."

Source:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/19/news/belarus.php

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