Chapter 3 - Between Starvation and Security: Poverty and Food in Rural Moldova

Summary

This chapter examines household economy in rural Moldova as a grey zone. Standard statistical measures are used to render Moldova as ‘Europe's poorest country’. According to national measurements, rural households suffer from the highest rates of poverty when measuring incomes against a ‘minimum consumption basket’. Such high levels of poverty are frequently used to explain the country's high rates of labour migration. Yet other statistics indicate that Moldova is a ‘food secure’ country, and empirical studies by agricultural economists suggest that average land holdings are sufficient for provisioning the food needs of rural households. How should such data be understood – are Moldova's rural households starving, or are they food secure?

In this chapter I outline the range of ambiguous and uncertain data that underlie assessments of rural poverty and household wellbeing. The ‘greyness’ surrounding the issues of land ownership and use, household production and consumption, cultural values, and social networks is extensive and persistent, even at the local level. Even when closely questioned and observed, informants insist that they themselves do not know how they ‘make ends meet’, deny their participation in numerous economic practices (such as lending and borrowing), and fail to recognise the substantial material contributions that villagers make to one another's welfare. Such greyness tempers my optimism about ethnography's role in revealing a comprehensive account of informality, at least in the case of rural Moldova (cf. Abel and Polese 2014). Nevertheless, an ethnographic investigation of this greyness does begin to reveal the moral narratives and agendas inherent in the national and international development programmes that insist on the unambiguous identification of the country's rural population as ‘poor’. No degree of refining the collection of economic data can change the fact that such programmes operate largely independently of the realities of everyday rural life. More importantly, an investigation into the persistence of the greyness surrounding rural household economy helps to reveal how the moral narratives that appear in the guise of poverty assessments have changed rapidly during the postsocialist period.