Russian Farmers Scramble To Survive Poor Harvest Drought Ravages Crops, May Force Russia To Import Grain

The Lenin’s Path collective farm has kept its name, but lost its way.

On the gently rolling farmland about 30 miles southeast of Moscow, its dwindling work force is still harvesting grain, milking cows and digging potatoes.

But production is down. There are chronic shortages of money. Market pressures are stripping away the farmers’ Soviet-era sense of security.

And this year, to add to their problems, farmers suffered a drought that could result in Russia’s worst grain harvest in three decades.

“They keep telling us things will get better, but they don’t. And they won’t!” shouted Valentina Koltsova, 46, as she chipped away at a mountain of oats with a shovel, feeding it into a noisy sorting machine.

Grain harvests have real and symbolic importance in Russia, where Soviet leaders trumpeted crop figures as a measure of the nation’s vigor.

Estimates of this year’s grain harvest vary. First Deputy Agriculture Minister Magomedtagir Abdulbasirov said it could drop as low as 73.7 million tons - the poorest since 1965, which saw 72.9 million tons.

Russia might have to import grain, he said, though not “enormous” amounts.

Last year, with a tepid harvest of 89.4 million tons, Moscow imported 3.3 million to 4.4 million tons. Government grain reserves are believed low, but experts say the state has cash to buy grain if necessary - even at current high world prices.

At the Lenin’s Path farm, where the grain harvest dropped by 25 percent this year, people don’t worry about starving. But they fear deepening poverty.

“The entire old system broke down, and the new one hasn’t arrived yet,” said Tatyana Korkina, chairman of the farm’s trade union committee. “There’s no stability. We’re much poorer. We can’t keep up with the prices around us.”

The vast majority of Russian farmland is still farmed collectively, although private farming has been more efficient.

Lenin’s Path, which has 6,348 acres under cultivation, remains almost totally dependent on the state to buy its products. Virtually all of its 1,980 tons of grain this year, for example, will be sold to a nearby state processing plant.

But the state is paying less these days, farm workers say, while the cost of fuel, transportation, pesticides and equipment are up.

Farm workers’ private plots remain a key to survival.

“I’d like to return to how we lived back then,” said the worker Koltsova, reminiscing about Soviet days, when goods were scarce but more affordable. “We could buy food, furniture, clothes, everything. Now I can barely buy bread and milk.”