The Russian Food System's Transformation at Close Range: a Case Study of Two Oblast's

THE RUSSIAN FOOD SYSTEM' S TRANSFORMATION AT CLOSE RANGE : A CASE STUDY OF TWO OBLAST 'S Grigory Ioffe Radford University Tatyana Nefedova Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Science s The National Council for Eurasian and East European Researc h 910 17th Street, N .W. Suite 300 Washington, D .C . 20006 TITLE VIII PROGRAM Project Information * Principal Investigator : Grigory Ioffe Council Contract Number : 815-07g Date : August 17, 200 1 Copyright Information Scholars retain the copyright on works they submit to NCEEER . However, NCEEE R possesses the right to duplicate and disseminate such products, in written and electroni c form, as follows : (a) for its internal use ; (b) to the U .S. Government for its internal use or fo r dissemination to officials of foreign governments ; and (c) for dissemination in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act or other law or policy of the U .S. government tha t grants the public access to documents held by the U .S. government . Additionally, NCEEER has a royalty-free license to distribute and disseminate paper s submitted under the terms of its agreements to the general public, in furtherance o f academic research, scholarship, and the advancement of general knowledge, on a non-profi t basis. All papers distributed or disseminated shall bear notice of copyright . Neithe r NCEEER, nor the U .S. Government, nor any recipient of a Contract product may use it fo r commercial sale . The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, funds which were made available by the U .S. Departmen t of State under Title VIII (The Soviet-East European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended) . The analysis and interpretations contained herein are those of the author. Abstract Post-Soviet Russia has begun to resemble an archipelago, with islands of vibran t economic life surrounded by a sea of stagnation and decay . Closely related to the spatial fragmentation of the country is the performance of its agricultural system. In particular, the performance of Russian farms has long stood in inverse proportion to their distance from larg e cities. This article addresses these issues by looking in close detail at spatial differentiation i n agriculture in two regions, Moscow Oblast' and Riazan' Oblast' . It begins by describing th e characteristics of agriculture in the two regions, and then compares regional spatial patterns an d changes in agricultural ouptut . If goes on to characterize the developing relations between farm s and food processors in two smaller subdivisions of these regions . and concludes by highlightin g major findings . Introduction In previous publications we shed some light on the evolution of Russian farming in the 1990s a s viewed from the geographical perspective. We specifically focused on the scale and the spatial pattern o f the decline in output of socialized farms; the surge in subsidiary farming, three major predictors o f agricultural performance – urbanization, natural setting, and market conversion (Ioffe and Nefedov a 2000a); and the role of cooperation between farms and food processors in the revival of the former (Ioff e and Nefedova 2001a) . In a series of related publications we also dwelled upon what we called Russia's growin g fragmentation . Indeed, due to the combination of population decline, the resumed centripetal (periphery- to-core) pattern of the population's spatial change, and the highly uneven distribution of wealth, th e country is beginning to resemble an archipelago, with islands of vibrant economic life immersed in a se a of stagnation and decay (Ioffe et al 2001) . These two topics, a) Russia's fragmentation and b) the performance and prospects of it s agriculture, are related . Russia is in fact a more rural and agricultural country than statistics o f employment and those of rural-urban population ratio would suggest (Ioffe 2001) . Russia's ecumene, including its very heartland, was sparsely settled to begin with (i .e., even before it was subjected to rura l depopulation); and agricultural land uses continues to dominate the peripheral parts of Russia's regions. It is in this periphery where spatial discontinuities now afflict the formerly uninterrupted belt of huma n colonization and settlement . It has come to this in part because the performance of Russian farms has long stood in invers e proportion to distance from major urban clusters, a fact noticed by many authors (Vil'tsyn 1974, Ioff e 1984, Zhikharevich 1989). Russian farms, ironically, do better when girdled and indeed imperiled b y non-agricultural developments, as is usually the case in the environs of large cities . The farms do muc h worse in an exclusively agricultural environment . The ensuing spatial pattern of agricultural land use intensity inside Russian regions has been interpreted as a quasi-Thunen economic landscape (Ioffe an d 1 Nefedova 2000c). While output per unit of land. indeed, declines outward from Russian cities (just as it did in Von Thunen's isolated state). the underlying causes of this pattern have been spatial population change and redundant land under cultivation . not spontaneous economic behavior of farmers in respons e to classic location rent (Ibid. ) To date, we have researched all the foregoing issues, with the exception of Thunian rings, on th e basis of geographical data matrices with oblasts and republics as their individual entries . We would now like to amend this work by viewing Russian farming at a closer range . Varying scales have long bee n shown to benefit geographical analyses . In agriculture, the spatial differentiation within areas is oftentime s more significant than between them. Findings reported in this article are based in large measure o n fieldwork conducted in May-June 2000 in Moscow Oblast (MO) and Riazan Oblast (RO), while the statistics used span 1990-99 ' . Russian media and anecdotal evidence are also invoked . In what follows, we first introduce MO's and RO's agricultural systems as case studies an d address their ability to meet local demand in food . We then analyze and compare regional spatial pattern s and change in agricultural output and characterize contractual links between farms and food processors . In so doing, we selectively apply an even smaller scale of geographical analysis, that is . we focus on two selective raions, Ramensky (MO), and Kasimovsky (RO). The final section puts our major findings int o perspective . Case Study Regions Although MO and RO are neighbors, they harbor a significant part of European Russia's agricultural variance. The specificity of MO's agricultural system lies in its suburban (Russian-style ) nature. To the Western reader "suburban agriculture" sounds like a contradiction in terms . Not so in ' Though statistical totals for the generally successful 2000 are available, the spatially disaggregated agricultura l statistics are available only for as recently as 1999, even at this writing (January 2001) . The most recent data book , Sel'skoye Khoziaistvo v Rossii 2000, was released in late January 2001 and contains time series up until 1999 . Based on our knowledge of the subject, we do not expect that adding 2000 oblast-level statistics would produce any significant changes in our analysis . 2 Russia, where the very connotation of "suburbia" or rather its Russian-language equivalent prigorod, i s strikingly different from its Western counterpart and . alongside residential and recreational components , invariably involves a strong agricultural one (Ioffe and Nefedova 2000a) . In Russia. "suburban agriculture" typically means two things: heightened land use intensity and concentration on perishabl e produce, primarily milk and vegetables (Mineyev 1962). And although the term, itself, does not necessarily invoke this, suburban farming in Russia also means high density of livestock, which is a principal component of land use intensity . In Russian agricultural literature, suburban agricultural specialization is typically contrasted wit h zonal specialization (Rakitnikov 1970 : 256-57, Kriuchkov 1978: 8-9) . The latter refers to types o f produce that fit a local natural setting. The available variety and pattern of biomes is thus viewed as th e main factor of specialization conducive to inter-regional exchange. Biomes in Russia more or les s resemble latitudinal bands stretching from the northwest to the southeast; and the so-called agricultura l zones, roughly speaking, coincide with them . Suburban enclaves, branded as azonal, disrupt thi s continuity, as they emphasize more or less the same staples regardless of the dominant biome . Azonal thus means extra-territorial, a distinction that more or less parallels the distinction in physical geograph y between soils formed on residual versus transported (alluvium or loess) parental material. Incidentally , alluvium-rich river valleys and deltas constitute another well-known example of relative extra-territorialit y in agriculture . Viewed from this perspective, not all of MO's agricultural system is azonal or suburban , but, barring the oblast's northwestern and southeastern peripheries, much of it is . For several decades, agricultural investment in the environs of Moscow exceeded that in most, if not all, other Russian and indeed Soviet regions . Per unit of agricultural land. only in the vicinity of Sain t Petersburg and in Estonia was this investment on a par with that in MO under Soviet rule . Invariably this showed up in statistics of fixed assets, according to which the highest in the Soviet Union was in MO, reflecting the concentration of mechanized animal and poultry farms, land drainage systems, and fertilize r 3 application . Although the concentration of demand for perishable produce fueled this heightene d investment in the first place. it was not the only factor. While conducting research for the project Moskovskii Stolichnyi Region . Ioffe estimated that growth of output by one percent cost 7 .5 times less additional investment than m the Non-Chernoze m Zone (NCZ) 2 as a whole, of which MO was part (Ioffe 1988) .

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