"The lonely cows"

Abstract

This article focuses on small-scale farming in Lithuania in light of the country's European Union (EU) entrance in 2004. Although the EU, together with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, had encouraged a rapid privatization of the former collective farms, the result was not an economically viable farming sector, but a multitude of unspecialized farms run by ageing farmers with but a single cow. These farmers are now viewed as the main obstacle to further development and are encouraged to retire. However, the farmers have proven reluctant to do so. Looking at different attempts to reduce the number of small farms, the article analyzes how the outcomes of the EU programs often are quite different from what was originally intended. Such processes are coined as EUropeanization: a term that embraces how the EU is interpreted and implemented in daily life by the farmers.