The downsizing of Russian agriculture

This article argues that the change Russian agriculture has experienced since 1991 is closer to Sturm und Drang wild market enforcement or suspension of rules than to reform. The Russian state shed its former regulative and supportive role at a time when its financial resources dried up, and it did so abruptly. Some law-making activities were initiated but they made little difference. Since 1999 the Russian state's fiscal condition has been improving, so the state is staging a comeback to the agrarian scene. But its interventions, though justifiable and similar to other national governments' impact on agriculture, are essentially anti-market. In the meantime, Russian commercial agriculture has been downscaled in terms of inputs and output alike. Livestock numbers and farmland have been particularly hard hit, and the ongoing agricultural recovery is more structurally and spatially selective than ever before. In the Non-Chernozem Zone of European Russia, for example, a spatially contiguous belt of agricultural colonisation has given way to an archipelago-like pattern. This article examines some acquired (socio-demographic) and inborn (environmental) constraints Russian farming faces and questions whether retaining of large swaths of farmland in Russia is compatible with a liberal economic order. The article begins with an examination of trends in three modes of farming operations. I then turn to the Russian state's re-entering the agrarian scene - after being conspicuously absent for almost a decade - in an effort to rein in the improprieties of the wild market. Vertical integration of farms and food processors is examined, as it has spawned most if not all agricultural success stories since 1999. Human capital in rural Russia is then interpreted as a limiting factor of agricultural modernisation. © 2005 University of Glasgow.