World

What to do about Soviet agriculture?

This question seems pretty close to the
boiling point these days, and major structu-
ral changes are expected out of the upcom-
ing full plenary meeting of the Communist
Party’s central committee which will review
agrarian policy.

In the press, among the 24 million or so
farmers who work the USSR’s 46,000 col-
lective (kolkhoz) and state (sovkhoz) farms,
as well as among consumers jostling for
food products in the nation’s grocery shops,
there is evident frustration and a strong
tendency to reach for panaceas. Underlying
much of the discussion is a widespread feel-
ing that collective agriculture in the Soviet
Union has been a failure.

Has it? There is probably no knottier
problem to be worked out in the course of
perestroika. Sorting out agriculture is a
complex debate which has become a matter
of immediate political necessity.

A major contributing factor to the gen-
eral sense of dissatisfaction has been a
number of recent serious efforts — as well
as some not particularly serious ones — to
review and analyze the seminal event: the
collectivization drive of the early 1930s.
Soviets are gradually coming to see collec-
tivization as an ultra-leftist campaign which
swept away age-old rural structures, traum-
atized the peasantry, and exacted a fearful
cost in lives and productive means. The
scars still run deep in the Soviet countryside.

More damaging to the long-term pers-
pectives of Soviet agriculture were the fol-
lowing decades of neglect. Some advances

~ [shee Se aie Seas

Perestroika down on the farm

many of the world’s most northerly metro-
politan centres. Moscow, a city of 10 mil-
lion, shares the same latitude with Fort
Severn, on Hudson’s Bay. Leningrad, with
around five million people, is roughly paral-
lel with Anchorage, Alaska. Even Kiev, in
the heart of the Ukrainian “breadbasket,” is
as far north as Sioux Lookout, Ontario, and
Winnipeg, Manitoba. Of those Soviet zones
that lie to the south, a greater part is steppe-
land plagued with perennial water shor-
tages.

Given this, the record of Soviet farming is
probably not so bad as it is routinely
painted in the West and lately, very sharply,
in the heat of Soviet discussions about the
subject. Indeed, where the state has targeted
Particular crops for priority development
— such as grain, cotton, sunflowers and
Sugar beets — harvest yields have been as
high or higher than those in comparable
North American territories.

To take the bottom line, per capita con-
sumption of key dietary items in the Soviet
Union have been climbing steadily. The
average Soviet diet is still far too heavy in
fats and starches, and deficient in fresh fruits
and vegetables. But taken in comparison
with, say, 1950, or even 1960, the improve-
ment has been nothing short of stunning.

Examined from other angles, however,
the present crisis of Soviet agriculture
becomes more evident, and alarming.
Yields of many crops which have not been
accorded priority status in the planners’
schemes fall dismally short of harvests
obtained on analogous North American

Fred Weir

of education, sanitation and mechanization
were brought into rural areas, but basically
those Stalin-era propaganda images of
modern industrial farmers revolutionizing
the countryside on the basis of the most
modern technology were fraudulent. Stali-
nism created long-lived structures of admi-
nistrative control which were effective at
organizing every aspect of the peasantry’s
life, and extracting the surplus, but which
gave very little back.

The countryside was seen as an arena
from which to pump resources into the
industrialization effort. Both consumption
and farm investment languished.

Khrushchev significantly increased invest-
ment in agriculture, and also tried to reform
the system. Under Brezhnev, investment
increased sharply and results were achieved
too: between 1964 and 1970, Soviet farm
output rose at a healthy annual rate of
almost four per cent. However, the Brezh-
nev leadership abandoned early attempts at
structural innovation, and continued merely
throwing money at the problem. Between
1970 and the early 1980s, agricultural
investment rose from less than 20 to over 30
per cent of the state budget, while the
annual growth in farm production fell to
barely one per cent. Diminishing returns —
a trend which has been arrested but not yet
turned around — is the clearest indication
that the system itself has reached its limits of
growth.

When considering this tangle of ques-
tions, no one should underestimate the
extent of the natural challenge faced by
Soviet farmers. A country of some 285 mil-
lion people, the USSR has roughly twice the
territory of the United States, but less than
half the agricultural potential.

More than two-thirds of the Soviet
Union lies above the 50th parallel, including

FROM MOSCOW

farmlands. Energy and resource inputs tend
to be much higher on Soviet farms per unit
of output. 3

Far from withering away after the death
of Stalin, the agricultural bureaucracy
seems to have multiplied itself, and become
a vast, multi-layered, multi-armed machine
overseeing and instructing the farm man-
agements and workers on virtually every
aspect of their operations. “‘Had food pro-
duction grown in: direct proportion to the
weight of official papers spawned by the
State agro-industrial committee,” quips
Novosti press analyst Alexander Kretov,
“the food program would have long ago
been overfulfilled.”

Decades of stifling central management
have bred an epidemic of apathy and waste.
For example, 10 per cent of all fertilizer is
“lost” between factory and field. The USSR
is the world’s largest producer of tractors
and combines — which, by the way, are
good enough to compete on the North
American market — yet due to lackadaisi-

cal maintenance, the service life of a Soviet -

tractor is far shorter on a Soviet farm than
on a Canadian one.

The really scandalous figure was divulged
by Mikhail Gorbachev during last Novem-
ber’s agrarian conference in Oryol: some 30
per cent of all Soviet farm produce is lost or
wasted in stages between harvest and groc-
ery counter.

This brings the problem to its full dimen-
sions. A major — if not the major — aspect
of the Soviet food predicament lies in the
general lack of infrastructure, of storage,
transport, processing and distribution facili-
ties. The United States, for instance, has 7:4
times more mileage of paved roads than
does the USSR. Large Soviet cities have
shockingly few large industrial dairies, can-
ning plants and other processing factories.

TASS PHOTOS — S. METELITSA

AGRICULTURAL RE—STRUCTURING ... Vasily Starodubtsev (above) heads a

new venture, an amalgamation of co-operative farms and industrial enterprises
which is self-managed and self-financed. At top, one of the co-op’s farm units
auctions off bulls, produced through Canadian genetic technology.

Raw produce is generally sent straight to
thousands of small grocery stores, where it
is weighed and measured out to individual
customers — an incredibly labour-intensive
and time-consuming process that literally
invites waste and theft, and contributes
more than anything else to those long and
frustrating shopping line-ups.

As the upcoming central committee ple-
num will show, the CPSU has identified the
food problem as key to unravelling all other
economic and consumer knots. Gorbachev
sums it up with his characteristic bluntness:
“It is simply obvious that we cannot
advance any further if we do not solve this
problem,” he told the Oryol conference.

One line of attack, already begun, is to
sharply increase investment in infrastruc-
ture, to build up a modern distribution sys-
tem. This, however, is an expensive,
complicated and long-term effort which will
clearly not bring quick returns. Further-
more, in this age when the Soviet govern-
ment openly admits the dangers of
deficit-financing and fuelling inflationary
pressures, it is finally understood that
investments have to be selective and hard-
nosed.

Second, and long overdue, the CPSU will
probably decide to step up the struggle to
dismantle the vast, multi-layered bureau-
cracy which sits on the backs of Soviet
farmers and dictates their every move. Most
Soviet farms have already been shifted to
profit-and-loss cost accounting, and the
intention is to wean them from the massive
state subsidies that until now obscure the
effectiveness of their work. Instead, farmers

will be offered higher prices through state
orders for their produce, and wider free-
doms to market their surpluses on their
own.

Finally, and most controversially, collec-
tive and state farms are being encouraged to
break down their operations and parcel out
land and functions to teams, or individual
families, who will take all the risks, make all
the decisions, and keep all the profits. This is
the “family contract,” or leasing system,
which in experiments has shown that it can
rapidly and substantially increase produc-
tion. The political temptations of this, at
least at the moment, seem to outweigh its
potential social dangers, and farmers are
being guaranteed 50-year tenure of the land
to go into contract forms of work.

Moreover, to many this seems an histori-
cally just way to address the problem. In the
Soviet press, and other forums, the cry has
gone up that “‘we have ‘un-peasanted’ the
land,” — the answer to which is, appar-
ently, that it must be re-peasanted.

Some are arguing quite openly that the
Soviet Union still requires some analogue of
a capitalist agrarian revolution, in which
innovative, efficient producers will be per-
mitted to take control of and aggregate the
land, forcing off lazy or inefficient produc-
ers.

The Soviet countryside is clearly on the
threshold of profound and _ sweeping
changes. But will the transformation lead it
forward to a truly modern, industrial social-
ist agriculture. or backward to a nostalgic
replay of the 1920s, only taking a different
road?

Pacific Tribune, March 20, 1989 e 9