Independent Latvian farmers formed a union Saturday in a move to make the family farm dominant again and restore the Baltic republic's agricultural might after 50 years of Soviet collectivization.
"Latvia was famous as a large exporter of food, but now we are in the position of beggars," Edwins Petersons told other delegates to the founding congress of the Latvian Farmers' Federation.More than 250 delegates gathered from throughout the republic and from nearby Scandinavian countries to adopt an ambitious program dedicated to ending the Soviet system of collectivized agriculture.
"The land is the national heritage of Latvia," said the new federation's program. "It is essential to implement agrarian reform in order to re-establish private farming of the land."
Latvia, with some of Europe's richest farmland, was an important producer of dairy and meat products during its brief independence between the two world wars.
The new farmers union called for all land to be returned to the tens of thousands of Latvian families that lost their homes during Josef Stalin's mass deportations of the 1940s and 1950s.
"A truly independent person is someone who owns something of his own," Petersons said to loud applause.
Dainis Gegers, head of the state agro-industrial committee in the republic, told the farmers, "The centralized system that has operated until now has run out of steam."
The farmers met five days before the republic's new Parliament was to convene to consider proclaiming Latvian independence.