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From: tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Orphaned Response
Message-ID: <187@ubvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 5-Feb-85 18:31:50 EST
Article-I.D.: ubvax.187
Posted: Tue Feb  5 18:31:50 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Feb-85 10:45:57 EST
References: <1935@inmet.UUCP>
Organization: Ungermann-Bass, Inc., Santa Clara, Ca.
Lines: 35

The Soviet government has encouraged private plots and
private food markets since Khrushchev, partly to reduce stealing,
partly to appease the peasant population, and to paper over
the miserable failures in collective farming.  If the government
didn't try to keep the peasant population happier, migration
to urban areas would increase or Stalin-era style repression
would have to be used to keep peasants on their farms.

Taking this into account, it's hard to know how figures about the
proportion of agricultural output produced on private peasant plots
show a failure of Soviet agricultural policy, in the absence of
contextual information.

First, the yield from a given plot varies enormously,
so that perhaps 2% can reasonably produce, say, between .002% and
25% of a nation's supply of a given crop or agricultural food
under optimal growing conditions.  Knowing that private plots
are more productive and wanting to keep peasants on their land,
the Soviet government might be giving their peasants good land.

Second, the food markets may be restricted to specific crops and
foods, so that state agricultural planning policy presumes a
balance between state and private production in the total
agricultural product.  If the state decides that "peasants will
be encouraged to produce meat" and that "therefore the state
won't produce so much meat", then the numbers used by US News
wouldn't be indictments of the Soviet system; rather they might
just ratify the success of balanced planning mechanisms.

All that figures about private agricultural production in the
Soviet Union show today is that Stalin's extreme collective
farming policy was a failure.  Do we need US News and World
Report to tell us that in 1985?

Tony Wuersch