Witold Staniewicz – minister reform rolnych w latach 1926–1930

Abstrakt

In the 20^th of June 1926 Witold Staniewicz was appointed to a minister of agricultural reforms in the Kazimierz Bartel’s office. He had been holding this post also in next governments (Józef Piłsudski’s and Kazimierz Świtalski’s), until the 4^th of December 1930. He was well educated in a range of agriculture and economy, what he could use in work on his position. Staniewicz was a member of a group of so-called experts, who haven’t been engaged in political life before appointing to a post in the first office of Bartel.

Through all four years of working as a minister of agricultural reforms Witold Staniewicz’s dynamic nature and organizational talents hugely influenced on structural transformations, which characterized polish agriculture between wars. He formulated then coherent program of restructuring polish agriculture. Staniewicz placed great emphasis on merging soils and growing little farms. Forming new farms from plot estates, settling action on Eastern Borderland, ordering land improvement, controlling obligations, crediting by the country and economical emigration were the way to change almost natural peasant farms into modern agriculture enterprises.

More than four years of Staniewicz’s job as a minister of agricultural reforms, left one’s stamp on the way of understanding the agriculture reforms issues in the prewar period of the Polish Republic, and his successors were continuing a plan of restructuring Polish agriculture initiated by him in 1926.