Crisis in Soviet agriculture

Those were the days when the seven hours were there for the taking, when wages could have been pushed up with ease, Crisis in Soviet Agriculture ON TUESDAY, November 25, the third All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers opened in Moscow. This was the first such gathering summoned by the Party bureaucracy since 1935.

Then, as now, the central question for the Kremlin was how best to feed the working class without undermining the bureaucracy's privileges power.

The main report at the Congress was presented by none other than Leonid Brezhnev.

After pointing to the rise in food consumption in Owing to consistent bureaucratic mismanagement, Soviet agriculture has not recovered from the disastrous results of Stalin's forced collectivization when crops and cattle were destroyed by Kulaks (rich peasants). ERS SINCE NATIONALIZATION have What gains the miners did fillers' strike of 1955 won new operate with and trust the work with a firm of mining Next comes the domestic when the union could have of the make were made through price-lists all over Yorkshire, Coal Board and the govern- consultants whose main job market, which last year took won workers' control of the pits.

Production this year was generally at least around the average for the last four years.

The leading question was the land, its efficient use and the raising of its fertility. As Brezhnev significantly pointed out :

'We are proud of the fact that the expanses of our motherland are boundless. But some people draw the erroneous conclusion from this and TN CArtUUr FUTURE INTO 4. 09"1 make were made through struggle, never with the struggle, never with the negotiated while the strike was ment.

(The Grimethorpe strike of 1947, for example, stopped a speed-up and the Yorkshire consider that our land sources are limitless.' This remark is doubtless an attack on Khrushchev's policy of spreading cultivation over as great a sown area as possible, irrespective of the potential yield and conditions of the locality.

Discredited

This was the now-discredited thinking behind the 'virgin land' schemes of the early 1960s. However, the 'same people' referred to by Brezhnev also include Joseph Stalin and all the apologists of 'socialism in one country' DIRLET MARE:

who sermonized on the inexhaustible resources of the Soviet Unon as providing the basis for a socialist society.

Brezhnev goes on to show that such attitudes ignore and in fact encourage colossal wastage and cripple any attempts to raise the productivity of the land.

What he ascribes to the erroneous conclusions of some people is really the incapacity of the bureaucracy to develop an efficient agriculture.

Urging an all-out campaign for conserving and fertilizing the land, he called for yet further expansion of the fertilizer industry and branded farmers reluctant to use new methods of soil improvement as 'anti-social'.

A series of large irrigation schemes in arid areas like the North Caucasus steppe region were reported on at the Congress.

Brezhnev related the plight of the middle Volga region, a grain-producing zone. Here production has been hit repeatedly by severe droughts leading to heavy losses.

Irrigate

Moreover, the state, as well as losing 'considerable quantities of produce from the drought-stricken areas, had to assist these areas with seed, forage, food and financial aid.

The question of grain production was passed over with little comment.

This silence seems to further substantiate the rumours of a new deal for importing wheat from the West.

The other problem emphasized was the age-old one of livestock. Soviet cattle are far too thin, Brezhnev reported.

More attention had to be paid to improving feeds; in this connection production of hay had risen only y per cent, but it had been decided that a minimum rise of 35 per cent in the production of grain for fodder was vital.

Silage production had decreased. A further two million tons of meat could be produced if the average carcass weight of cattle was increased to 350-400 kilos.

Soviet stockraising has never entirely recovered from the disastrous effects of Stalin's forced collectivization.

The problems explained by Trotsky "The Revolution Betrayed' in 1935 have a remarkable echo here.

In 1967, 97 million Soviet cattle produced 4.3 million tons of beef, while in the United States million such animals supplied more than double the quantity: 9.5 million tons.

Half yield

After 35 years of 'socialist' agriculture, beef yield is about half that capitalist farms of the USA.

Brezhnev dwelt at length on what he considered to be the main remedy for these problems: eliminate the chronic shortage of technical cadres and send more soil experts, agricultural chemists, engineers to the farms to establish an improved scientific and technical standard in agriculture which would increase yields all round.

Also launched as a new solution to the inadequacies of farming were the AgrarianIndustrial complexes. of mining main job was making claims against the 21.8 million tons of coal.

Already several such combined factory-farms specializing in particular food products had been set up in the Ukraine and Moldavia.

This type of organization is presumably designed to gear food production more closely to the demands of the consumer and provide a basis for more rapid mechanization of processing.

It would also appear that the policy of the present leaders of the bureaucracy is once again orientated towards fostering and handing out concessions to the industrial managerial sections of the bureaucracy.

Greater role

In this case the technician and the food-factory manager are given a greater role in the direction of the collective farms —a far cry from Khrushchev's policy of handing tractor stations to the farmers.

Side by side with these organizational proposals were the political ones of setting up Councils of Collective Farmers and an All-Union Council of Collective Farmers.

These are clear attempts to get the farmers under centralized bureaucratic control and to facilitate their acceptance of the new line of subordinating the collective farm organizations to the industrial and technical bureaucrats.

These agricultural policies are a swing away from Khrushchev's line of boosting the local collective farm managers as an independent force.

They are an attempt to stave off the growing crisis in Soviet farming by another bureaucratic technical shift, this time in favour of the managerial layers already favoured in the factories by the BrezhnevKosygin leadership.

Trotsky's comment summing up Soviet farming is highly relevant here:

'In agriculture immeasurably more than in industry, the low level of production comes into continual conflict with the socialist forms of property. The bureaucracy, which in the last analysis grew out of this contradiction, deepens it in turn.' ('The Revolution Betrayed', p. 135.)