#6
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002
Subject: re 6318 - Collective Farms
From: "Steve Wegren" <swegren@mail.smu.edu>
A few comments in regard to the NYT article reprinted in JRL #6318 on the prospect of collective farms being discarded. Before your readers run out and celebrate the end of the collective farming structure, I should note that it is highly unlikely that the NYT correspondent is correct. If he is, it would mean a drastic reversal of agrarian policy under Putin. Since coming to power, Putin, and his Minister of Agriculture Alexei Gordeev, have consistently and repeatedly expressed the need to reduce food imports, and the means to achieve that goal is to revive production on large agricultural enterprises (former state and collective farms). Moreover, both Putin and Gordeev have expressed the need to support large farms and see them as the source of reviving the agricultural economy in general. Towards that end, the Putin adminstration has tightened food import policy, adopted a program to partially write off and defer agricultural debt, and devised a new agricultural credit system. (I discuss these and other aspects in an article entitled ""Russian Agrarian Policy Under Putin," in Post-Sovietr Geography and Economics, vol. 43, no. 1, 2002.)
If not to discard large farms, what is the new draft law on agricultural land sales intended to do? Most likely, the law is part of the larger strategy to close down or consolidate chronically unprofitable farms. Considerable effort has been spent devising a policy to deal with this problem, and Gordeev has spoken frequently about this issue. The draft law on land sales states that agricultural land must continue to be used for agricultural purposes. It is probable that the intent is to allow profitable and productive large farms the legal right to acquire land from weak, unprofitable farms. This latter interpretation is entirely consistent with the policy speeches made by Gordeev during the past 2.5 years. Thus, the agricultural land law being considered should be seen not as the demise of large farms, but as a mechanism to strengthen those that will survive consolidation, thereby improving Russian agricultural performance. Like it or not, large agricultural enterprises will not disappear in Russia anytime soon.
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