Marginal Farmland in European Russia

Two geographers specializing in Russian agriculture and rural development present an exploratory essay on the phenomenon of agricultural land abandonment in the countryside of European Russia. A particular focus is on investigating the relative importance of physical conditions (fertility) and proximity to regional population centers in explaining the prevalence of land abandonment. A map depicting the differences between actual and normative (natural/climatic) grain yields sets the stage for a comparison of the contributions of physical and locational factors to agricultural productivity and a critical assessment of the merits of “development in breadth” versus “development in depth.” Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, Q10, Q15. 1 figure, 7 tables, 30 references. I abandoned one-quarter of my arable land based on mathematic calculation, and he abandoned land out of inability to cope with it. —Afanasii Fet (1863/2001, p. 163). he Soviet period in Russian history was marked by sizable expansion of farmland. The area sown to crops in Russia grew from 52 million hectares in 1921 to 127 million hectares in 1978. In the 1970s, this growth came to a halt, and by the early 1980s, farmland and most of its components (first pastures and meadows and then arable land, including the area under crops) began to contract. According to Aleksey Gordeyev, Russia’s current Minister of Agriculture, about 20 million hectares of arable land in Russia are abandoned (Sivkova, 2003). In the European Union, with its 380 million people, the total area of arable land is only about 75 million hectares. The principal objective of this paper is to examine the general characteristics of land abandonment in Russia, thus setting the stage for more focused and penetrating analysis in the future. Reflecting the geographer’s perspective, we scrutinize this issue from the vantage point of areal variations. Because a steadily productive farmland is hardly ever deserted,2 it is the areal variation in agricultural productivity that we focus on, assuming that abandonment is preceded by persistently low yields. If this reasoning is basically correct, two aspects of 1Respectively, Professor of Geography, Radford University, Box 6938, Radford, VA 24142 [email: [email protected]] and Institute of Geography, Russian Academy of Sciences, 29 Staromonetny per., 109017 Moscow, Russia. This paper is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0134109. 2However, this may be the case in areas contiguous with expanding urban boundaries. We have elaborated on this phenomenon in earlier publications (e.g., Ioffe and Nefedova, 1999). We address this issue briefly when citing the example of Moscow Oblast. For the most part, however, the transfer of agricultural land to residential or other urban uses lies beyond the scope of the present paper. T 32 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS differential productivity in agriculture should command our attention: the natural fertility of the soil, and location vis-à-vis major urban centers. We have discussed these aspects of differential rent elsewhere (Ioffe and Nefedova, 2002). Among other things, it was shown through calibration of a regression model that fertility and location relative to major cities are reliable predictors of the regional land tax, a measure of differential utility of land in Russia. But if this is the case, then the same logic should apply to the antithesis of utility: in the aftermath of persistently low yields, farmland of two types is likely to be deserted first: (1) that located in a harsh physical environment; and (2) that located in remote rural areas. The likelihood of land abandonment should be even higher if both factors of low productivity are in place. Our abundant field observations in the less fertile Nonchernozem Zone of European Russia support this argument. Here, centripetal gradients in agricultural output per unit of land were revealed (see especially Ioffe and Nefedova, 1997, Chapters 10–12; Ioffe and Nefedova, 2001a). In contrast, in European Russia’s south, where natural fertility is higher, distance from a regional center is not a ubiquitous predictor of output per unit of land. In our previous research we paid significantly more attention to modern incarnations of location rent,3 and so-called differential rent I (areal variations in output due to natural fertility) was not our primary subject. Cognizant of this bias, we now focus on natural conditions of Russian agriculture first. Following the reference to the much-underrated research by Neal Field (1968), we present original calculations used to disaggregate Russian farmland into physiographically defined classes. On the basis of a well-known Russian methodology for assessing natural soil fertility, we then investigate whether agricultural output has been low only because of physical conditions. Because the likely answer to this question points to the no-less significant influence of rural depopulation, we turn to agricultural location relative to regional centers—that is, to a variable whose association with rural demographics has long been highlighted (see, for example, Igudina and Ioffe 1986). We also address the more and less reliable statistics that may enable one to monitor land abandonment. Finally, we attempt to place our results in the more general context of Russia’s spatial development. Given the exploratory nature of the paper, no quantitative methods other than table enumeration are utilized. The focus is on European Russia, which contains 90 million of the Russian Federation’s total of 119 million hectares of arable land. PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT “Russian farmers have to contend with some of the worst climates faced by farmers anywhere” (Symons, 1990, p. 126). This especially pertains to winter temperatures, the length of the growing season, the depth of freezing, and the erratic patterns of cold blasts and thaws. Comparative analysis of the environmental conditions for agriculture that set Russia apart from much of Europe and North America used to be a popular topic of 19th-century Russian and European scholars (e.g., Klyuchevskiy, 1904; Hettner, 1905). Such comparisons are rare these days. To our knowledge, they have not been called upon over the last two decades by Western experts assessing the performance of Russian agriculture. 3Specifically, we focused on center-periphery gradients in gross agricultural output, the gradients to some extent attributable to rural population density (e.g., Ioffe and Nefedova, 1997, Chapters 5, 10, and 12 ; Ioffe and Nefedova 2001b), and on the persistence of a quasi–von Thunian economic landscape in Russia (Ioffe and Nefedova, 2001a). IOFFE AND NEFEDOVA 33 This stands in peculiar contrast to the wealth of relevant environmental data available. In 1968, Field actually used some of these data in his superb but rarely cited comparison of the agricultural land bases of the USSR and North America. According to Field, “environmental quality must be weighed heavily in assessing the relative productivity of the agricultural land resources of the Soviet Union and North America” (Field, 1968, p. 11). He continued, “One must be . . . cautious in attributing largely to the human factors differences in the per acre returns” (ibid.). Field demonstrated that in the USSR four-fifths of the cropland fell within the least productive thermal zone, that with less than 200 degree-months (ibid., p. 9). He also showed that in the USSR the best conditions were in the West (West Ukraine being the very best) and the worst in parts of Russia. According to Field’s thermal (degree-months) and moisture (percentage of potential evapotranspiration) ratings, Moscow is equivalent to Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Rostov-Don, in the premier agricultural region of Russia, to Pierre, South Dakota (ibid., p. 8). Both U.S. locations are relatively marginal in the American agrarian realm. Why wasn’t Field’s well-documented analysis consulted more extensively by Sovietologists? For those who, like these authors, did not live in the West at the time, it is difficult to second-guess. But a not-so-tacit agreement seem to have dominated the agrarian subfield of Sovietology, whereby references to nature were considered mere excuses. Interestingly, the same perspective dominated among the analysts and liberal reformers in the USSR itself. After the collapse of communism, the environmental constraints of Russian farming and other activities again became a topic popular with Russian writers who began to revisit the 19th century classics. The most discernible of today’s voices is that of Leonid Milov, who emphasized the fact that in Europe, with the exception of its extreme north, winter isotherms trend north-south (Milov 1998, p. 8). So, for example, Kursk (52° N. Lat.), located in the middle of Russia’s Chernozem belt, has colder winters than Helsinki, Finland (61° N. Lat.). Milov devoted special attention to the annual period in which cattle must be kept stalled (seven months) as undermining the productivity of animal husbandry, and argued that Russia’s historical penchant for subjecting an over-abundant land base to cultivation is in fact a response to the inadequate quality of land in Russia’s heartland (ibid., p. 22). According to Milov, Russia is the archetypal society with environmentally conditioned minimum surplus value per unit of land, which historically has resulted in specific forms of socio-political organization (e.g., the mir, or rural commune) and governance (despotism). Milov’s reasoning, which establishes a causal link between despotism and the harsh natural environment, may justifiably place him in a cohort with the most unabashed environmental determinists of the past. One reason why a paradigm “largely ridiculed out of mainstream [American] geography by the 1920s” (Beck, 1985, p. 1) is held in high regard in today’s Russia is that removing old taboos is often considered a virtue in and of itself. Under the Soviets, a deterministic paradigm was neither defeated in substantive debates nor even sidelined in the name of political correctness. Rather, the excoriation of determinism “became officially canonized as part of Stalinist dogma” (Bassin, 1992, p. 4). So today, according to the principle of reactive perception, it is regarded by some as a new and fashionable orthodoxy, with all the pretensions of a normative theory. Popularizing this orthodoxy, a book by Andrey Parshev cites Milov as the only source of information about Russia’s inferior physical environment. Titled “Why Russia is Not America” (Parshev 2000), the book explains that Russia’s involvement in free trade is self-defeating in view of inherent environmental disadvantages bound to make Russian goods costly. The book was on the Russian bestseller list for 52 straight weeks. 34 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS Despite the overtly ideological biases of Milov’s approach, we think that its premises cannot be discarded out of hand. We share Bassin’s view, according to which “environmentalism per se [does] not possess an inherent ideological bias” (Bassin, 1992, p. 5) that leads in a preconceived direction, whether it is the enslavement of non-Western civilizations or the justification of Russia’s economic self-isolation from the rest of the world (as per Parshev 2000) or, for that matter, Russia’s long affair with despotism. What is more, the opposite approach—that is, a tacit denial of the environment’s essential role in agriculture and socioeconomic development in general—would be a mistake of similar, if not greater, proportion. Recent research by Allen Lynch (Lynch, 2002) reinforces this idea. The present study seeks to present a distribution of European Russia’s agricultural land according to thermal and moisture zone categories, a distribution somewhat more detailed than that compiled by Field, but following the general logic of his analysis. Field’s information base on temperature and moisture distribution in the USSR was fairly limited and generalized. Much more detailed classifications of the Soviet agricultural land resource became available in the 1970s and 1980s (Prirodno-, 1975, 1983). These classifications involved many more indicators than Field’s analysis (e.g., temperature extremes, the degree of continentality, snow cover, soil type, net primary productivity, etc.), which are more spatially detailed and involve a taxonomy of biomes and their component ecosystems. Among other things, the authors of these classifications—for the most part, physical geographers by training—substantiated numerical thresholds of natural characteristics outside of which certain swaths of agricultural land (cropland in particular) could be regarded as marginal. For example, zones with less than 1600 degree-days above 10° Celsius (mean daily temperature) and zones with a ratio of precipitation (P) to evaporation (E) below 0.55 are considered marginal. Correspondingly, zones with 1600–2200 degree days may be labeled submarginal, as are semi-arid (0.55 < P/E < 0.77) and overly humid (P/E > 1.33 on gley soils) zones. In the latter case (parts of Vologda and Kostroma oblasts as well as the Republic of Karelia), relatively small pockets of arable land are usually interspersed within large and often expanding tracts of forest. Any interruption in agricultural activity poses the risk that these pockets will be reclaimed by the surrounding forests. Tables 1–3 present the distributions of European Russia’s farmland compiled by the authors from maps contained in Prirodno(1983), the network of the 1,483 current (2000) rayons (minor civil divisions) of European Russia, and current (2001) records of rural population and arable land procured from regional statistical data books. These tables indicate that 38 percent of European Russia is marginally cold, and 27 percent is submarginally cold; 11 percent of European Russia is marginally arid, 25 percent is submarginally arid, and 25 percent is marginally wet. These distributions apply to European Russia’s total land area. The same tables, however, suggest that only 2–3 percent of arable land is marginally and 24 percent is submarginally cold; about 16 percent of arable land falls in the area with 70– 90 percent probability of drought, and about one-third of arable land is in the semi-arid area where every third year is fraught with drought. Successful farming requires a certain combination of heat and moisture. Following Field’s example, we compiled Table 4 with a bimodal distribution of European Russia’s total land between supply classes of heat and moisture. A small dark rectangle within this table fits the area that is favorable for agriculture. It accounts for 10 percent of European Russia’s total rural land area. The outer portion of a larger rectangule (defined by double lines) in the same table includes submarginal areas, which account for an additional 40 percent. This means that half of European Russia is ill suited for agriculture. According to Table 5, however, marginal lands contribute 15 percent of the gross agricultural output, with 9 percent of IOFFE AND NEFEDOVA 35 it contributed by excessively arid and 6 percent by excessively cold areas. Submarginal areas account for the largest share of output: 59 percent, including 38 percent produced in cold areas. Areas with an optimal supply of heat and moisture account for only 29 percent of the total output. Table 1. Thermal Zones of European Russia Defined on the Basis of Sums of Daily Mean Temperatures Exceeding 10°C by Rural Rayon Degree-days Description Zones’ percentage shares in: Rural population density, people per km2 Total land area Arable land Rural population <1200 Grossly inadequate supply of heat possibly suitable only for vegetables with a short growing season 22 1 1 1 1200–1600 Inadequate supply of heat, suitable only for early-ripening crops 16 1 5 3 1600–2200 Below average supply of heat, suitable for mid-season maturing crops: cereals, potatoes, flax, and sugar beet used for animal feed 27 24 31 1