Transformation of the Russian Food System at Close Range: A Case Study of Two Oblasts

Two geographers with considerable experience in assessing developments in Russian agriculture and rural issues extend previous research on national spatial patterns of agricultural output to the regional (intra-oblast) level. The objective is to derive additional insights into the relative importance of natural bioclimatic potential and proximity to urban markets as factors influencing agricultural productivity. Attention also is devoted to emerging linkages between food processing operations and farms, and the extent to which such arrangements have been beneficial for regional agriculture. The paper outlines five broad issues that will influence the future evolution of the Russian countryside. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 018, Q10, Q15. 9 tables, 8 figures, 51 references. I n previous publications we have examined the evolution of Russian agriculture in the 1990s from a geographical perspective. More specifically, we focused on the scale and the spatial pattern of the decline in output of socialized farms; the surge in subsidiary farming; three major predictors of agricultural performance—urbanization, natural setting, and market conversion (loffe and Nefedova, 2000a); and the role of cooperation between farms and food processors in the revival of the former (Ioffe and Nefedova, 2001a). In a series of related publications we also dwelled upon what we termed Russia's growing fragmentation. Indeed, due to a combination of population decline, the re-emergent centripetal (periphery-to-core) pattern of the population's spatial change, and the highly uneven distribution of wealth, the country is beginning to resemble an archipelago with islands of vibrant economic life immersed in a sea of stagnation and decay (Ioffe et al., 2001). These two topics—(a) Russia's fragmentation and (b) the performance and prospects of its agriculture—are interrelated. Russia in fact is a more rural and agrarian country than statistics on employment and on the 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 rural depopulation), and agricultural land uses continue to dominate the peripheral parts of Russia's regions. It is in this periphery where spatial discontinuities now have interrupted a formerly continuous belt of human colonization and settlement. This has come to pass in part because the performance of Russian farms has long stood in inverse proportion to their distance from major urban clusters, a fact noted by many observers (Vil'tsyn, 1974; Ioffe, 1984; Zhikharevich, 1989). Ironically, Russian farms do better when girdled and indeed imperiled by non-agricultural developments, as is usually the case in the environs of large cities. The farms fare much worse in an exclusively agricultural 1 Respectively, Professor of Geography, Radford University, Radford, VA 24142-6938 and Senior Researcher, Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Staromonetnyy pereulok 29, Moscow 109017, Russia. The authors wish to acknowledge funding by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research.