Understanding the decline of smallholders in contemporary Russia

2020 ◽  
pp. 003072702096920
Author(s):  
Stephen K Wegren
Keyword(s):  
Food Production ◽  
Household Production ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
The Past ◽  
Societal Changes ◽  
Historical Role

The conditions that made smallholders important during the Soviet period no longer exist. Economic and societal changes mean that smallholders’ historical role is less relevant to contemporary Russian life. Smallholders’ food production is in decline, and smallholders are likely to experience continued marginalization going forward. Niche specialty markets cannot compensate for the broad-based decline in household production. Mega-farms and supermarket chains present unprecedented challenges to Russia’s smallholders, whose future is less certain than at any time in the past 40 years.

Waterlogging and Salinity in the Indus Plain : Some Basic Consideration

1965 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Dorfam
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Water Development ◽  
The Past

It takes more than ordinary population for a group of strangers to recommends changes in the efforts of a great nation to contend with a problem that goes that goes to the very roofs of its social structure and its livelihood. Yet we did just that in our Report on Land and Water Development in the Indus Plain[l]. We hoped our recommendations would be considered sympathetically and debated fully, that our sound suggestions would be adopted and our unsound ones forgiven. All this has been granted us, and more. The months since the Panel's report was prepared have been eventful for the economic development of West Pakistan. It is hard to cast our minds back to the gloom that filled the atmosphere when the Panel was convened. Food production had been stagnant for the past several years, sem and thur were spreading through the most productive portions of the Plain, expensive efforts to control these twin menaces had been baffled. WAPDA knew, of course, that in principle tubswells could do the job, but there were more failures to report than successes

scholarly journals Ecosystem Services Changes on Farmland in Response to Urbanization in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area of China

Land ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 501
Author(s):  
Xuege Wang ◽  
Fengqin Yan ◽  
Yinwei Zeng ◽  
Ming Chen ◽  
Bin He ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Hong Kong ◽  
Ecosystem Services ◽  
Ecosystem Service ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Great Loss ◽  
The Past ◽  
Bay Area ◽  
Farmland Loss ◽  
The World

Extensive urbanization around the world has caused a great loss of farmland, which significantly impacts the ecosystem services provided by farmland. This study investigated the farmland loss due to urbanization in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) of China from 1980 to 2018 based on multiperiod datasets from the Land Use and Land Cover of China databases. Then, we calculated ecosystem service values (ESVs) of farmland using valuation methods to estimate the ecosystem service variations caused by urbanization in the study area. The results showed that 3711.3 km2 of farmland disappeared because of urbanization, and paddy fields suffered much higher losses than dry farmland. Most of the farmland was converted to urban residential land from 1980 to 2018. In the past 38 years, the ESV of farmland decreased by 5036.7 million yuan due to urbanization, with the highest loss of 2177.5 million yuan from 2000–2010. The hydrological regulation, food production and gas regulation of farmland decreased the most due to urbanization. The top five cities that had the largest total ESV loss of farmland caused by urbanization were Guangzhou, Dongguan, Foshan, Shenzhen and Huizhou. This study revealed that urbanization has increasingly become the dominant reason for farmland loss in the GBA. Our study suggests that governments should increase the construction of ecological cities and attractive countryside to protect farmland and improve the regional ESV.

Introductory remarks

1977 ◽  
Vol 280 (972) ◽  
pp. 105-105
Keyword(s):  
Climatic Change ◽  
Food Supply ◽  
Time Scale ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Climatic Fluctuations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Different Sources

In the last year or two there has been a remarkable increase in the interest, both popular and scientific, in the subject of climatic change. This stems from a recognition that even a highly technological society is vulnerable to the effects of climatic fluctuations and indeed may become more so, as margins of surplus food production are reduced, and nations become more interdependent for their food supply. In this respect our concern is with quite small changes - a degree (Celsius) or less in temperature and 10 % or so in rainfall. Probably we may discount some of the more alarmist suggestions of an imminent and rapid change towards near glacial conditions as these are based on very sketchy evidence. However, whatever the time-scale of climatic fluctuations with which we are concerned, we may hope to learn a great deal which is relevant to the factors which will control our future climate from the study of its more extreme vagaries in the past. Information relevant to the weather in such extreme periods is coming forward in increasing detail and volume from a wide range of disciplines. The variety of the evidence, its lack of precision as a strict measure of climate, and the number of different sources all make it difficult for an individual to build up a clear picture of past climates. However such a picture is needed, if explanations and interpretation are to be possible. Ideally one would need a synchronous picture of the climate of the whole world at selected epochs in the past. Various international programmes are directed to forming such pictures.

scholarly journals THE TIME CAPSULE IN THE POST-SOVIET SOVKHOZ

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (47) ◽  
pp. 84-110
Author(s):  
Elena Malaya ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Logic ◽  
Soviet Economy ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
State Farm ◽  
The Past ◽  
North East ◽  
The North ◽  
Time Capsule ◽  
Post Soviet Period

The article is devoted to ideas about the Soviet era, widespread in а village in the north-east of Crimea. The paper offers an analysis of how the community, formed around a partially preserved state farm, builds its own picture of historical time, expands the imaginary boundaries of the Soviet period, and also thinks of it not so much as the past, but as the past future. Particular attention is paid to the object that organizes its temporality — а time capsule, which was laid twice in the studied village (in 1967 and in 2017), as well as its connection with the teleology of modernism. The article compares letters to descendants, sealed in two time capsules, as well as additional documents sent to the future. The text of the 1967 letter is based on a progressive narrative and contains a list of economic indicators of the success of the Soviet economy. By contrast, the 2017 text creates a picture of an unstable time of change, in which the focus is not on the predictable future, but on the vague past and present. The author of the article explains the nostalgia for the Soviet era in the studied community by the reaction to the changes and crises of the post-Soviet period, and suggests using temporal logic in the research of post-socialism.

scholarly journals Food, diet and the pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 122 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-57
Author(s):  
Kate Bayliss ◽  
Ben Fine
Keyword(s):  
Health Services ◽  
Health Outcomes ◽  
Healthy Eating ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
The Past ◽  
Poor Diet ◽  
Land Grabs ◽  
Corporate Interests ◽  
Global Systems

This article is concerned with the ways that diet-related health outcomes (including increased incidence and severity of Covid-19) are linked to the system of provision for food. Worldwide obesity has tripled in the past three decades, creating an immense strain on health services, with poor diet associated with 22 per cent of global deaths in 2017. We show that neoliberal and financialised global systems of food production have intensified dysfunctional practices such as land grabs and price speculation. Moreover, capitalist expansion of production inevitably creates pressures to increase consumption such that malnutrition from overeating runs neck and neck with undernutrition on a global scale. It is shown how food corporates (producers, retailers, and so on) are instrumental in creating avenues to affect our diets in ways that are far more effective than government campaigns to promote healthy eating. It is these powerful systemic corporate interests that need to be addressed in order to improve diets and consequent health outcomes.

scholarly journals Padalka S.S., Kirilenko I.G., Vergunov V.A. Agrarian History of Ukraine: in Three Parts Part 1. From Ancient Times to the Beginning of the XXth century. Kyiv: Agrarian Science, 2019. 332p. Part II: Soviet Period 1917-1990 Kyiv: Agrarian Science, 2019. 458 p. Part III: The Period of Independence 1991-2018. Kyiv: Agrarian Science, 2019. 372p.

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-142
Author(s):  
Ivan Romaniuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Conscious Choice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ancient Times ◽  
The Village ◽  
Reliable Basis

The article reviews the textbook in three parts, in which well-known authors using primarily source documents, the work of domestic and foreign researchers have revealed agrarian relations in Ukraine from ancient times to the present. Particular attention is paid to issues of change in agriculture, socio-economic life of the village, the environment of the peasantry, the daily life of the Ukrainian countryside. Knowledge of the experience of the past agrarian system can become a reliable basis for a conscious choice of optimal ways of further progress of Ukraine as a democratic and prosperous state.

Managing Opioid Agonist Therapy in the Post-Soviet Limbo

2021 ◽  
pp. 009145092110635
Author(s):  
Alexandra Dmitrieva ◽  
Vladimir Stepanov ◽  
Alyona Mazhnaya
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Agonist Therapy ◽  
Opioid Agonist ◽  
Opioid Agonist Therapy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current State ◽  
Extensive Growth ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Laws And Policies

According to Dante, “Limbo” is the first circle of Hell located at its edge. Unlike other residents of Hell, the Limbo population suffers no torment other than their lack of hope. We argue that a lack of hope in post-Soviet Ukraine is expressed by a lack of conditions for a better future since the past is overrepresented in the present. Therefore, every movement transforms under the past’s pressure, changing its course in order to reproduce and perpetuate ghosts of what is long gone. We argue that the current state of Ukraine can be framed as “post-Soviet limbo.” If the great stability of the Soviet regime was a result of overregulation and extensive control, or of “uncertainty avoidance,” then a post-Soviet limbo is a result of “managing uncertainty” simultaneously influenced by Soviet legacies and neoliberal promises of growth, calculability, and deregulation on the part of the State. “Soviet legacies” are dominant and represent a mix of formal overregulation explicitly presented through laws and policies and informality which, according to some authors, became even more widespread in the post-Soviet period than it used to be under the Soviet rule. We do not aim to consider the past legacies as being opposite to neoliberal features and futures, but negotiate the way the two are interrelated and mutually reinforced in the present to produce the post-Soviet limbo. Ukraine’s performance of Opioid Agonist Therapy (OAT) coverage is consistently estimated as insufficient and needing further improvement. However, we argue that that there are two modes of OAT implementation in Ukraine: state-funded (formal) and privately-funded (informal). The latter’s size does not fall into official estimates since the national reports on OAT performance never include the numbers of patients involved in informal treatment. We suggest, that the informal mode of OAT implementation appeared as a result of contrasting efforts towards intensive regulation and extensive growth. To understand how these two modes are produced in the context of post-Soviet narcology, how they differ and where their paths cross, we analyze two types of texts: legal and policy documents regulating substance use disorder (SUD) treatment, mainly OAT; and qualitative data, including interviews with OAT patients and field notes reflecting the environment of OAT programs. Finally, the presented article seeks to answer how the state’s contrasting efforts to manage the uncertainty of SUD treatment through OAT regulation and implementation reproduce the post-Soviet limbo and, thus, people with SUD as “patients of the state” who are frozen in a hopeless wait for changes.

The Origins and Dynamics of Inequality

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Psychology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human History ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Role

Whereas President Barack Obama identified inequality as “the defining challenge of our time,” this book claims more: it is the defining issue of all human history. The struggle over inequality has been the underlying force driving human history’s unfolding. Drawing on the dynamics of inequality, this book reinterprets history and society. Beyond according inequality the central role in human history, this book is novel in two other respects. First, transcending the general failure of social scientists and historians to anchor their work in explicit theories of human behavior, this book grounds the origins and dynamics of inequality in evolutionary psychology, or, more specifically, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Second, this book is novel in according central importance to the critical historical role of ideology in legitimating inequality, a role typically ignored or given little attention by social scientists and historians. Because of the central role of inequality in history, inequality’s explosion over the past 45 years has not been an anomaly. It is a return to the political dynamics by which elites have, since the rise of the state, taken practically everything for themselves, leaving all others with little more than the means with which to survive. Due to elites’ persuasive ideology, even after workers in advanced capitalist countries gained the franchise to become the overwhelming majority of voters, inequality continued to increase. The anomaly is that the only intentional politically driven decline in inequality occurred between the 1930s and 1970s following the Great Depression’s partial delegitimation (this should remain delegitimation globally) of elites’ ideology.

Unsafe at Any Time

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-118
Author(s):  
Karla Vermeulen
Keyword(s):  
Adaptive Response ◽  
Anxiety And Depression ◽  
Early Environment ◽  
Safety Risk ◽  
The Past ◽  
Methodological Challenges ◽  
Societal Changes ◽  
Perceptions Of Safety ◽  
The Impact

The chapter “Unsafe at Any Time” examines Generation Disaster’s perceptions of safety, risk, fairness, and other consequences of their early environment, and it explores whether these concerns relate to the high rates of anxiety and depression reported by this generation relative to other cohorts. It also describes the methodological challenges that are inherent in trying to make valid comparisons to previous ages, given all of the dramatic societal changes of the past few decades, and the chapter discusses the impact of the belittling descriptions of this cohort by elders as being overly sensitive or generally inferior to previous generations, when in reality their often cautious worldview may be an adaptive response to a genuinely more dangerous world.

Household Production and the Large Farm Sector

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Pallot ◽  
Tat'yana Nefedova
Keyword(s):  
Household Production ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Rural Settlements ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Agricultural Enterprises ◽  
Agrarian Economy ◽  
Formal Employment ◽  
Large Farm ◽  
Rural Places ◽  
Large Farms

Household production varies according to the range of resources available to it; different environments give rise to different types of production, setting limits upon what can be produced. But as we saw in the previous chapter, in order to gain access to the environmental resources they need, households are at the mercy of a variety of gatekeepers that include local authorities, large farm managements, other private landowners, and the community at large. Among the other actors with which rural households have to interact, by far the most important in most regions are the large farms or ‘agricultural enterprises’. In this respect, there is continuity with the Soviet period when the managements of collective and state farms determined the social, cultural, and political character of rural places and the economic welfare of the rural population. Collective and state farms were like ‘company towns’, but with their authority extending over large territories and embracing a number of populated places. Figure 5.1 shows the territorial arrangement typical of a collective farm during the Soviet period. Since 1991, many of their former areas of authority, both formal and informal, have been withdrawn from large farms; they have lost control of land under rural settlements and they have reduced influence over a range of local services where their interventions used to be decisive. To advocates of market reforms, the retreat of large farms from these areas is a welcome rationalization of the agrarian economy and part of the process of redirecting farm activities towards producing agricultural products by the most efficient means possible. But this retreat has often left a gap that cashstrapped local authorities and private enterprise have not yet been able to plug, so that rural people’s experience of the market transition is of the loss of formal employment and a reduction in the level of services they previously enjoyed. In this situation, it is not surprising that rural Russia has been the scene of a muted, but real, contestation of market reform on the part of people intent on defending their access to resources and services to which they still believe they are entitled.

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