Putting Food on What Was the Soviet Table

Discontent and economic disintegration in this troubled Soviet winter of 1991-92 are everywhere. Shelves in state food stores offer little choice or are empty. Republics ban the export of scarce goods to fellow republics. Price increases threaten to overwhelm the average Soviet family which is already spending 80 percent of its income and many hours in line each week for food. Boris Yeltsin, the first popularly elected president of Russia, hears demands from former supporters that his government resign, because his radical economic reforms are a failure.
What is to be done?
Putting food on the Soviet table is an essential first step. But correcting 60 years of misguided agricultural and economic policies will not be done in a winter or a year or two. Reforming the agricultural system will take decades. Breaking up inefficient state and collective farms into smaller individual farms or cooperatives, improving roads, storage facilities, and processing plants, and creating free markets that will give producers incentives to respond to consumer needs at reasonable prices will take decades.
The task is enormous. But the resources of the former Soviet Union, as the following papers by Soviet and Western agricultural experts indicate, are great. The country produced more wheat, dairy products, vegetables, and small grains than the United States did in 1990. The country does have the potential to feed itself, but not by producing more.
The country's current "food crisis" results not from poor harvests, though they are a factor, but from an inability to get food efficiently from the field to the table. Anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of Soviet food crops is lost in this process.
If agrarian reform is to succeed, however, it must also be coupled with comprehensive economic reform: the acceptance of private property, free market pricing, and the elimination of central bureaucracies.
In the short run, contributors agree, the West will need to provide humanitarian food aid to meet emergency needs and to support emerging and fragile democratic governments.
But the West can best aid the former Soviet Union by providing long-term technical assistance and people-to-people programs that help the Soviets develop a market economy and the skills to run small, independent farms.
What is clear from these papers is that there is no quick fix for the agricultural problems of the former Soviet Union. But what is also clear is the country does have the potential to put food on the table and feed its people well.