Jadwiga Lopata

Jadwiga Lopata created an eco-tourism program that promoted the environmental, economic, and health advantages of small family farms over large-scale factory agriculture.

Jadwiga Lopata lives near Cracow, Poland, on her small organic farm in the farming community where she was raised. A former computer programmer, she has worked on rural preservation since the mid-1980s. In 1993, she founded the European Center for Ecological Agriculture and Tourism-Poland (ECEAT-Poland). In 2000, she established the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside (ICPPC) with Julian Rose, an organic farmer and ecologist in the United Kingdom. She is its co-director.

Of Poland’s 2 million family farms, 68 percent are smaller than 20 acres (8 hectares). In Poland, the national park system preserves only 1 percent of the land. Therefore, the diverse landscape of the family farms provides much of the only open space for hundreds of diverse species. These farms do not use mono-crop, high-chemical farming methods. Many rely on reduced levels of pesticide, and the interest in organic techniques is growing.

Having successfully resisted Communist efforts to collectivize agriculture and create giant state farms, Poland’s substantial family farm sector is now threatened by corporate agriculture. Since 1989, these small farmers have been forced to compete with Western European farmers who receive subsidies from the European Union. The subsidies encourage large-scale, highly mechanized, monocrop and chemically intensive agriculture. As Poland was moving toward EU membership, Polish family farmers realized that their livelihoods and traditional ways of life were being threatened.

Lopata founded ICPPC with Rose in order to draw international attention to the threat that EU membership posed to Poland’s countryside. In 2001, ICPPC conducted an intense national and international campaign, “Charter 21 – Countryside Manifesto for 21st Century Poland,” that called on the Polish government to take a firm stand in protecting the Polish countryside and its ecological, natural, and cultural diversity in negotiations over joining the EU. This campaign gained the support of more than 462 Polish and international organizations representing more than 30 million people. She also organized meetings with the Polish Parliament, the European Commission Directorate-General for Agriculture, and the European Parliament.