Land Use Projections for Southern Non-Black-Earth Regions of Russia: Coping with Uncertainty

To address the question whether the abundancy of agricultural land in regions of Russia can favour growth of their crop production in a long run, a simulation framework is developed that is robust to a high level of uncertainty. Its core is a variety of a partial equilibrium model with a fully specified demand function and an equilibrium point as the only datum about the supply function. Procedures of systems analysis are applied to reduce the uncertainty and to measure its harm. As a result, reliable conclusions are obtained from 1000 random trials. The uncertain parameters of the model are ranked on urgency of their more accurate estimations for the purpose of obtaining a more precise projection. Among 11 uncertain parameters of the model, only four significantly affect incremental land use. Simulations suggest that combining protectionism with monetary inflows in R&D allows moderate growth of the cultivated land area. So, the hypothetical congestion effect of land abundancy is ruled out.