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True, Soviet agriculture is plagued by climatic problems beyond the control of any government. Though the lush fields of the Ukraine produce grain in abundance, much of the country's arable land lies in far northern latitudes, where enormous swings in seasonal temperatures and erratic rainfall can lead to variations of as much as 40% in annual harvest yields. The geographical and climatic problems are compounded by the system's self-inflicted wounds of rule by decree.
Though collectivization is sometimes compared with the spread of so-called agribusiness conglomerates in the U.S., the differences are enormous because workers have little concern about production results on a state farm. Proof: the 2% to 3% of the Soviet Union's farm land that is privately owned produces about 25% of all Soviet agricultural output, primarily vegetables, fruit, milk and meat.
Farm efficiency is further crimped by the scarcity of trained manpower. With more and more young people leaving the farms and heading for factory work in the nation's cities, agricultural output is being left increasingly in the hands of the elderly and the less skilled.
Indeed, shortage of labor is a serious problem for all sectors of the Soviet economy. Employment in industry is now growing at only .7% annually, as compared with 1.8% per year in 1976-78.
When small problems in agriculture or industry fester into large ones, the Soviet bureaucracy revs up huge counterattacks that become economic overkill. Whenever Soviet grain harvests exceed expectations, for example, officials scour the countryside commandeering manpower and trucks from projects that they have to temporarily abandon.
The result is a continuous and inefficient scramble for scarce resources, as planners lurch uncertainly from one high-priority project to the next. One such enterprise is the 2,000-mile-long Baikal-Amur Mainline railway across Siberia. This has become an engineer's nightmare, as any study would have shown. Huge stretches freeze solid in the winter and then become quagmires during summer.
Though the Soviets hunger for Western technological imports like computers and machinery, they have problems marketing their own products to the West in return. The only Soviet exports sold easily abroad, in addition to vodka, are raw materials such as petroleum and gold. Despite attractive prices for Yak-40 passenger jets or Lada cars, Western countries have shown little interest in low-quality, dowdy Soviet merchandise. The Soviets usually are forced to dump their exports on the soft-currency countries of Eastern Europe or the Third World.
After seeing his standard of living rise steadily since World War II and having been promised more to come, the average Soviet citizen now faces the prospect of declining prosperity. Says Abram Bergson, director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "Over the coming decade, the Soviets will be lucky if the increase in consumer goods is half what it has been lately." The central planning that helped achieve rapid industrialization has become the roadblock to further economic development.