The Practice and Theory of Personal Subsidiary Farming in Soviet and Russian Agriculture

The story the official statistics tell about production in the household sector is remarkable for a country as urbanized and industrialized as the Russian Federation. As Table 2.1 shows, this former industrial giant and major oil producer derives 51 per cent of the value of its agricultural produce from farms that, on average, are under one hectare in size and, according to official land use statistics, occupy just 6.6 per cent of the country’s agricultural land (Sel' skoe khozyaistvo, okhota i lesovodstvo, 2004: 56). At the end of the Soviet period personal subsidiary farming was responsible for 26 per cent of the USSR’s agricultural output, a smaller share than now but still significant for what was at that time the world’s second largest industrial economy (Agrarnaya reforma v Rossii, 2000: 204). The post-Soviet expansion in the sector’s relative contribution mainly took place in the early 1990s after which it maintained a steady but more modest increase from the second half of the 1990s to 2002. It fell back in subsequent years but in 2004 was still contributing twice as much as before the USSR’s collapse. In West European countries such small-scale agricultural activity supplements production on large farms or it caters to niche markets. In Russia, the pattern is different and small farms are the principal producers of certain staple foodstuffs such as potatoes and vegetables and equal partners in the production of meat and dairy products. This is shown in Table 2.2. In 1990, before the collapse of communism, personal subsidiary farms accounted for 30 per cent of the country’s vegetables and fruit and between 13 and 42 per cent of the beef, pork, and mutton; collective and state farms were also major producers of these products (ibid. 205). The complementarity between large and small farming was thus a feature of the Soviet period, but it has been brought into sharper relief in the post-communist period. As a result, the importance of people’s farms in the agri-food system in the Russian Federation today can be properly understood only within the context of changes in large farming.