Dace Dzenovska

During a conversation on rural depopulation, Aina, a staff member of a local museum of history, told me that “nature does not like empty space.” Her brother, like many other residents of this municipality, has sold his land to “the Danes”: “The Danes are coming in and the locals are leaving. Land prices are falling. Danes are the only ones with financial resources. It is the colonization of this century!”

Aina’s view is shared by many residents and government officials in Latvia’s rural municipalities. Many question the motives behind Danish foreign investment in agriculture, especially pig farming, suggesting that the investors are not looking to work and to take care of the land, but rather to make a quick profit from agricultural subsidies. More than that, Latvia’s residents suspect that Danish farmers are receiving additional benefits from their government, which enable them to take their often environmentally unfriendly business elsewhere. Danish farmers themselves, as well as those who consider that intensive farming is the only way to revive the Latvian countryside, consider that local residents produce such myths due to the prevailing sentiment of economic nationalism, as well as out of ignorance, envy, and even ethnic discrimination.

In this article, I suggest that the stories Latvia’s residents tell about “the Danes” should not only be viewed as products of ignorance and / or irrational prejudice, but also–or rather–as a form of critique of post-Soviet agrarian capitalism and EU integration. In the narratives of Latvia’ s rural residents, “the Dane” has become a metaphorical figure that helps to personify processes that Latvia’s residents find obscure, but which, in their view, perpetuate the unequal conditions in which they find themselves in relation to the foreign farmers. I suggest that the conspiracy theories produced by Latvia’s residents are good to think with when undertaking critical analysis of the economic practices that have shaped life in rural Latvia during the last twenty years.