Moscow Times September 3, 1998 Now, a Real Crisis: No Potato Crop By Natalya Shulyakovskaya Staff Writer First there was the financial crisis. Then the financial crisis and the political crisis. Now, Russia faces the financial crisis, the political crisis ... and the potato crisis. A summer drought, followed by the pouring rains of August, have put potato crops across European Russia at risk. September is the potato harvest season, but potatoes that have spent too much time in wet, cold soil are susceptible to phytophthora, a fungus that rots the tuber. "This year, I will be lucky if I dig up as many potatoes as I put into the ground in the spring [as seed potatoes]," said Yury Monakhov, a Muscovite who five years ago started tending a private potato field in the village of Terekhovo, about 200 kilometers southwest of the capital. Monakhov's potato field supplements the diets of six people in two families the year round. "This year is going to be bad, very tight," agreed Sergei Solenkov, the head of the crop department at the Agriculture Ministry. "And the people survive on potatoes." A failed potato crop is of no minor significance. Russians eat six times as many potatoes each year as do Americans, and the potato accounts for 10 percent of the nation's calorie intake. In the Soviet era, about 60 percent of the nation's potatoes were grown on small private plots -- a statistic often cited by critics of the command economy system as proof that its collective farms were failing the people. Today, according to the Agriculture Ministry, 90 percent of the nation's potatoes are grown at the dacha. Potato and bread consumption both rose dramatically in the early 1990s as meat, milk and fish consumption dropped, and annual potato consumption leveled off in 1993. Today, it is 127 kilograms per capita, 20 percent above the pre-perestroika intake, according to figures from the State Statistics Committee and from the Academy of Sciences' Food Consumption Institute. Growing their own vegetables, particularly potatoes -- along with moonlighting as gypsy cab drivers, gathering mushrooms in the woods or offering up the family apartment for lofty rents -- are a key way urban Russians have cushioned themselves from the collapse of the economy. This is so widely recognized that last month the Defense Ministry suggested that military bases organize mushroom- and berry-hunting trips for soldiers who haven't been paid in months, so as to keep them from going hungry."In [most] regions people somehow manage to get by without dollars, T-bills and other securities -- but to live without potatoes is simply not possible," warned Novaya Gazeta newspaper last week in a full-page spread about the threat of a potato rot. "The rains have rotted or ruined the potatoes so badly that to store them for more than two months is impossible," wrote correspondent Valery Pisigin, after taking an automobile tour of rural regions stretching from St. Petersburg to Moscow. "And now there they are standing alongside the roads -- not in the tens or the hundreds, but the thousands, all from surrounding towns or villages, trying to sell potatoes they probably would not be able to give away." The Agriculture Ministry will only have an authoritative estimate on how bad the potato harvesting is going in a matter of days, and for now, they are putting on a brave face. "We are not losing optimism," said the ministry's crops expert Solenkov, in a phrase reminiscent of the Soviet news reports from the "battlefields of the harvest." But all of European Russia -- from the Volga River valley to the Moscow region to the so-called Red Belt of Bryansk -- has been drenched under rain for a month. Fungus may attack the potatoes, and grain harvests may also be hampered. "It's impossible to enter a field with a combine; everything is soaked," Solenkov said. Despite the importance of the matter, his ministry's appeal for more extensive weather forecasts from the Meterological Service were stymied: The service wanted to be paid an amount the ministry found exorbitant, and so no forecasts are available. In the meantime, as some contemplate hoarding imported foodstuffs -- which are bought abroad with foreign currencies and so are rising in price as the ruble falls in value -- others are buying up the humble homegrown potato. At Butyrsky market on a recent afternoon, Oksana Bosonogova, 25, was standing by three potato sacks of more than 50 kilograms each that she had just bought. "I am stocking up," she said. "I was helping my parents in the Smolensk region to dig up their potatoes, and all of them turned out to be spoiled." Around the corner, wrapped in a blue plastic hood to keep them from getting soaked in the rain, stood Yury Pelevin, 58, an unemployed assembly worker from the village of Savelovo, about 140 kilometers from Moscow, and his wife Vera, 58."Here is my social security," Pelevin said, stretching his hands over tidy piles of red-headed mushrooms he was selling for 4 rubles a bunch. The Pelevins usually collect about 500 kilograms of potatoes from their small patch of land -- enough to feed nearly four people year round -- but this year they said they feared their crop might be spoiled. "I bring home my pension, 378 rubles [about $29.50 at Wednesday's Central Bank exchange rate of 12.82 rubles to the dollar], and it's barely enough for bread. Everything else comes from the vegetable garden or the forest," Vera said. -- Gregory Schwartz Department of Political Science York University 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada Tel: (416) 736-5265 Fax: (416) 736-5686 Web: http://www.yorku.ca/dept/polisci
