by Dimitri Orlov
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2008/04/keeping-fed.html

The inability to feed their people stands as the Soviet Union's most
striking failure. In just a couple of generations, a country that was
the breadbasket of Europe had been turned into Europe's agricultural
basket case, so that by the time the Soviet Union collapsed it was
financially and politically hamstrung by its need to obtain grain
import credits from countries that were hostile to its interests. In
the 1970s, an oil boom made it complacent, but when the boom ended and
oil prices collapsed it was left with no room to maneuver. Its oil
provinces reached their all-time peak of production in the mid-80s;
consequently, it was unable to further ramp up production and boost
exports.

How does a country with more arable land than just about any other, an
ancient and successful agricultural tradition complete with
all-you-can-eat food festivals and a history of grain surpluses,
produce such a dismal result? A short excursion into Russian history
might be instructive here: small mishaps can be produced accidentally,
but disasters on this scale take serious effort. Speaking of
agricultural disasters as a class, it is worth noting at the outset
that agriculture is seriously dull work, best done by decidedly simple
people who do not mind bending down to touch the ground all day until
they look like hunchbacks. Almost genetically predisposed to growing
food, these hunchbacks are to be found in all traditional farming
societies the world over. As they toil, they wear out the soil very
slowly or, if they are not too stressed, and just a bit clever, not at
all. In return for their humble servitude, they stay in daily and
direct contact with nature in all of its fickle bounty, remaining part
of it. As long as they do not resort to shortcuts, such as relying on
just one plant, be it maize or potato, their numbers fluctuate
naturally along with the climate. But try replacing the humble
hunchback with a university-trained agronomist, her hoe with a
tractor, her bag of heirloom seeds with some mass-produced hybrid and
rainfall with an irrigation pump, and you soon find yourself on the
road to environmental oblivion. While Russian agriculture presents us
with a particularly frightening example, let us not discount American
efforts in the same direction: with enough effort at subjugating
nature, through chemical farming, genetic manipulation, pumping down
non-replenishing aquifers, ethanol production and other weapons of
mass desertification, anything is achievable, even starvation, right
here in the US.

Up to the middle of the 19th century, the Russian empire operated
something vaguely analogous to the plantation system in the old South,
with an ever more distant, French-speaking nobility presiding over a
multitude of illiterate, Russian-speaking serfs. Based on a more
humane serfdom rather than outright slavery, it bound peasants to the
land, giving the landowner control over its use and nominal
responsibility for their welfare. As the 19th century wore on, the
imperial throne found the perpetuation of serfdom increasingly
embarrassing to its international prestige as a leading European
power, and so, in 1861, less than a month before the outbreak of the
American Civil War, serfdom was abolished by imperial decree, without
any bloodshed and without any serious detriment to agricultural
production. Some peasants were gradually able to acquire their own
land, and by the early 20th century the more fertile parts of Russia
and the Ukraine had many prosperous farming families.
Pre-Revolutionary Russia was, by all accounts, a well-fed place.

Then came the man-made disaster, known as collectivization, the
results of which can be plainly visible to this day to anyone who
travels through rural Russia and the surrounding lands. The epicenter
of this disaster is central Russia, and the further out one travels —
to the Baltic states or to Western Ukraine — the less one sees of its
enduring devastation. It is as if a series of plagues had swept
through the land, leaving poverty and desolation in its wake. Under
the revolutionary slogan "All land to the people!" the prosperous
farming families were labelled as the class enemy and persecuted.
Grain, including seed grain, was confiscated to feed the starving
cities. The result was starvation in the countryside and a collapsing
rural population. In place of the prosperous family farms, collective
farms were organized, once again binding peasants to the land, but
without the benefit of the old church-bound feudal traditions. The
introduction of mechanized farm machinery, chemical fertilizers,
pesticides and "scientific" farming methods did little to forestall
the disaster: the best farmers were either dead or had escaped to the
cities. Despite much government effort and some wildly creative
solutions, such as attempts at broadcasting seeds using rockets,
agricultural production never fully recovered, because fixing the
problem involved undoing collectivization and this was not politically
advisable.

Another thing not politically advisable was neglecting to feed the
people. In particular, all areas at all times had to be supplied with
bread, which, more than any other staple, was symbolic of the covenant
between the Communist government and the subservient masses. Bread
riots, which could not be repressed and could only be quelled by a
serendipitous delivery of bread, struck fear into the heart of every
local Communist functionary. To make such a scenario unlikely, there
were local food stockpiles in every city, stocked according to a
government allocation scheme, and staples such as bread were almost
always available. And while the quality of other government-supplied
food was sometimes questionable, the bread was always excellent — a
reflection of its symbolic importance. But the right to be fed did not
necessarily extend beyond the basic carbohydrates, especially in the
outlying areas. Moscow was always the best-supplied city, with
Leningrad a distant second, while in many provincial towns the store
shelves were mostly bare except for bread, vodka and a few varieties
of canned foods, and whenever some scarce item, such as sausage,
suddenly appeared, lines would instantly form until it was sold out.
Shopping was rather labor intensive, and involved carrying heavy
loads. Sometimes it resembled hunting — stalking that elusive piece of
meat lurking behind some
store counter.

Shortly before the Soviet Union's collapse, it became known informally
that the ten percent of farmland allocated to kitchen gardens (in
meager tenth of a hectare plots) accounted for some 90 percent of
domestic food production. During and after the economic collapse, with
the government stores quite uncontaminated by food, and often closed
altogether, these plots became lifesavers for many families. The
summer of 1990 particularly stands out in my mind: it was the summer
when we ate nothing but rice (imported), zucchini (grown by us) and
fish (from a local lake, caught by some neighbors).

The dismal state of Soviet agriculture turned out to be paradoxically
beneficial in fostering a kitchen garden economy, which helped
Russians to survive the collapse. Russians always grew some of their
own food, and scarcity of high-quality produce in the government
stores kept the kitchen garden tradition going during even the more
prosperous times of the 60s and the 70s. After the collapse, these
kitchen gardens turned out to be lifesavers. What many Russians
practiced, either through tradition or by trial and error, or sheer
laziness, was in some ways akin to the new organic farming and
permaculture techniques. Many productive plots in Russia look like a
riot of herbs, vegetables, and flowers growing in wild profusion. In
the waning years of the Soviet era, the kitchen garden economy
continued to gain in importance. Beyond underscoring the gross
inadequacies of Soviet-style command and control industrial
agriculture, the success of the private kitchen gardens is indicative
of a general fact: agriculture is far more efficient when it is
carried out on a small scale, using manual labor.

While most families cooked and ate at home, institutional fare was
also considered important. With salaries regulated and with nothing
interesting to spend them on, how well fed one was at work took on
added significance. Institutional food varied in quality: officers in
the nuclear navy ate remarkably well, while privates in the infantry
were fed unremarkable porridge and soup. Jobs at many government
organizations, factories and institutes were valued for the quality of
their commissaries. These sometimes stayed open even as the economy
crumbled, production lines stood still, and salaries went unpaid for
months, providing an important lifeline. Some factory cafeterias even
went beyond providing a hot meal; there, workers could buy a whole
uncooked chicken or scarce canned goods, all very reasonably priced.

Restaurants did exist, but were generally outside the budgetary
constraints of most families. They always struck me as rather odd,
because their menus were by and large works of fiction. Whatever it
was you tried to order, the waitress would invariably respond with a
laconic "Nyetu! " ("We don't have that"). After a few attempts at
ordering something you might actually want, you would break down and
ask: "What do you have? " The answer to this mystery would be
something like "Borscht. It's good today." Surprisingly enough, it
often was quite good. Although restaurants were something of a rarity,
there were always plenty of snack bars, ice cream parlors and
refreshment stands.

In addition to small-scale farming, forests in Russia have always been
used as an important additional source of food. Russians recognize and
eat just about every edible mushroom variety and all of the edible
berries. During the peak mushroom season, which is generally in the
fall, forests are overrun with mushroom pickers. The mushrooms are
either pickled or dried and stored, and often last throughout the winter.

In spite of the monumental failures of Soviet agriculture, the overall
structure of Soviet-style food delivery proved to be paradoxically
resilient in the face of economic collapse and disruption. The
combination of local food stockpiles administered by politicians
conditioned to treat bread riots as career-ending calamities, the
prevalence of government institutions that attended to the sustenance
of their employees and plenty of kitchen gardens, meant that there was
no starvation and very little malnutrition. But will fate be as kind
to the United States?

In the United States, most people get their food from a supermarket,
which is supplied from far away using refrigerated diesel trucks,
making them entirely dependent on the widespread availability of
transportation fuels and the continued maintenance of the interstate
highway system. In an energy-scarce world, neither of these is a
given. Most supermarket chains have just a few days' worth of food in
their inventory, relying on advanced logistical planning and
just-in-time delivery to meet demand. Thus, in many places, food
supply problems are almost guaranteed to develop. When they do, no
local authority is in a position to exercise control over the
situation and the problem is handed over to federal emergency
management authorities. Based on their performance after Hurricane
Katrina, these authorities are not only manifestly incompetent, but
also appear to be ruled by the ethos that it is better for the
government to deny services than provide them, to avoid creating a
population that is dependent on government help.

Many people in the United States don't even bother to shop and just
eat fast food. The drive to maximize profit while minimizing costs has
resulted in a product that manipulates the senses into accepting as
edible something that is mainly a waste product. Under strict process
control procedures, agro-industrial wastes, sugar, fat and salt are
combined into an appealing presentation, packaged, and reinforced by
vigorous advertising. Once accepted, it beguiles the senses by its
reliable consistency, creating a lifelong addiction to bad food. The
chemical industry obliges with an array of deodorants to mask the
sickly body odor such a diet produces. Immersed for a lifetime in a
field of artificial sensory perceptions, dominated by chemical,
man-made tastes and smells, people recoil in shock when confronted
with something natural, be it a simple piece of boiled chicken liver
or the smell of a healthy human body. Perversely, they do not mind car
exhaust and actually like the carcinogenic "new car smell" of vinyl
upholstery.

When people do cook, they rarely cook from scratch, but simply re-heat
prepackaged factory-produced meals. When they do cook from scratch,
the supposedly fresh ingredients come from thousands of miles away and
are selected for ease of shipping rather than any actually desirable
qualities, making them woody or pulpy and only barely edible. Since
good taste is no longer on the menu, the focus shifts to quantity,
resulting in appallingly sized portions of undifferentiated protein
and starch drowned in fat, administered in national festivals of
pathetic gorging, of which Thanksgiving seems to be the main one. But
this is all good for business and keeps the cancer, diabetes and heart
disease industries humming. This is all very unhealthy, and the effect
on the nation's girth is visible clear across the parking lot. A lot
of the people, who just waddle to and from their cars, seem unprepared
for what is coming next. If they suddenly had to start living like
Russians they would blow out their knees. Most of them would not even
try, but simply wait, patiently or impatiently, for someone to come
and feed them. And if that food arrives and consists of a styrofoam
box containing a puck of pseudo-meat between two pucks of pseudo-bread
and a plastic bottle of water laced with pseudo-syrup, they would be
satisfied.

But the food may never arrive. There is already a fair amount of
hunger in the United States and many families are forced to choose
between food and gasoline. Gasoline is the greater of the two
necessities, because it is necessary for them to drive to buy food:
their car always gets to eat first. In the future, the choice will be
made for them: they will be priced out of the market, their food used
to produce ethanol, so that the more fortunate can keep driving their
cars a tiny bit longer. The process of starving them out might go by
one of the euphemistic terms economists seem to favor, such as the
somewhat sinister "demand destruction," or the more bland "load
shedding." This process is already underway in Mexico, where corn masa
producers who provide a staple purchased by the poor are squeezed out
by the ethanol producers. The United States is next. Who is that
skeleton driving a pickup truck? Let us hope it is not you, but
someone else — someone less fortunate than you, with whom you are not
acquainted.