Marcy Kaptur is planting Seeds of Hope this spring.
The longest-serving woman in the U.S. House of Representatives, with 35 years in Congress, emerged from a March visit to the farm fields near Zhytomyr, a city of 266,000 people that is 140 kilometers southwest of Kyiv, with new zest over the potential of Ukraine’s women and its agricultural sector.
Women and agriculture. They go together. And she’s got the statistics to back her up.
Calling Ukraine’s rich black earth and environmentally friendly farming practices “the largest organic platform that exists anywhere on earth,” Kaptur noted that 4.5 million small household farms, tended primarily by women, produce most of the nation’s potatoes, vegetables, fruits and berries, dairy and meat.
And the proof is in the tasting. “The best strawberries I ever ate are in Ukraine,” said Kaptur, 71, a Democrat who represents Ohio.
She said Ukraine uses environmentally friendlier production techniques compared to the United States, where genetic modifications, fertilizers, pesticides and other intensive, industrial practices have taken their toll on the land and water over the years.
Nonetheless, U.S. farm production is much higher than in Ukraine. And some U.S. technologies and techniques, such as greater use of hydroponics, will help Ukraine boost yields, she said. She also said the spread of U.S.-style agricultural extension services, which spread knowledge and best practices throughout the land, and cooperatives, which help farmers market and sell their products, will help Ukraine as well.
“I see how Ukraine can help us, while we in America can help Ukraine,” she said.
She has spearheaded a joint venture called Seeds of Hope with the aim to “Empower Women Farmers in Ukraine.” Its Facebook page says the mission is to “introduce simple new technologies and concepts for efficient and successful farming for smallholders in Ukraine. Ukraine is a breadbasket of Europe. Ukrainian women had proved to be a powerful force behind every positive change.”
But farming wasn’t the only thing on Kaptur’s mind, who spoke to the Kyiv Post from Washington, D.C., on April 17.
Kapturis running for re-election in 2018 from her 9th district in Ohio. The Toledo Blade newspaper says she’s been re-elected 17 times with an average of 72 percent of the vote. Her first election in 1982 was by a smaller margin and, in 2012, she also faced a tough Democratic primary challenge from then-Rep. Dennis Kucinich in 2012.
She is co-chair of the Ukraine Caucus in Congress and has been a steadfast supporter of the nation.
Part of her popularity, it appears, stems from her biography, summarized on her official website: “Congresswoman Kaptur, a native Toledoan, lives in the same modest house where she grew up. She is a Polish-American with humble, working-class roots. Her family operated a small grocery store and her mother later served on the original organizing committee of a trade union at the Champion Spark Plug factory in Toledo.”
Her experience in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union goes back almost a half-century. She took her first trip to the Soviet Union in the 1970s and tell the story of a police state where people were afraid to speak to foreigners or worship how they wanted.
“The people here who greeted us risked their lives,” Kaptur recalled in Kyiv of her first trip to Ukraine under Soviet rule. “People could not go in the church of their choice because the relatives would lose their jobs as teachers and factory workers. We had the only car and it was confiscated and put in the Lviv Opera House so we couldn’t travel where we want. That is the Ukraine I saw 50 years ago.”
She developed a deep bond with Ukrainians.
“Ukraine has always had an educated people who have never been able to realize their dreams,” she said on March 29 at a Kyiv reception in her honor organized jointly by the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council and the American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine. “It’s been progress, progress, progress over the last half-century.”
Here are excerpts from the Kyiv Post April 17 interview by Skype:
Kyiv Post: Will Democrats take control of Congress in 2018 and should Joseph Biden run for president in 2020?
Marcy Kaptur: “I am in Biden’s camp if he wants to run. I would do everything I could do to help him. Democrats will take the field, certainly, in the House. I am not sure in the Senate, but I have hope.”
KP: What can we do to stop Vladimir Putin?
MK: “Educate the generation in Russia that comes after him. It’s such a great country. But it’s denied progress because of the selfishness and ego of their tyrannical leader. I am so disgusted with him. He’s locked into the past. He’s living in the 20th century. Anything I can do to strengthen NATO and Ukraine I will do and I have done.”
KP: You’re backing programs for therapy and rehabilitation of Ukrainian soldiers. Why?
MK: “I can’t tell you how upset I am about going into the former Soviet Union and meeting veterans who have never gotten care..All over Russia and Ukraine, we have to be careful with the words we use. ‘Psychiatric care’ harkens back to the Soviet era when psychiatric care was used as punishment. We have to focus on ‘therapeutic care’ and ‘well-being.'”
KP: Are you satisfied with the progress in fighting corruption and establishing rule of law under President Petro Poroshenko and the rest of Ukraine’s political establishment?
MK: “I think we have to work on two fronts: We have to have tough love with aid conditioned on achieving honorable objectives and then we have to raise the next generation (properly).”
