216 



Mr. Allard. Thank you. I think your comments have been en- 

 hghtening on both subjects. 



Mr. PE>rNfY. There's the old sajdng in Russia, **We pretend to 

 work, and they pretend to pay us." The version in terms of land 

 policy is "They pretend to give us the land, £ind we pretend to own 

 it." So nothing has really changed. 



Mr. Van Atta. They have been attempting to privatize or to 

 change incentives ever since the system was founded, and every 

 time they attempt to change incentives, you get reports back from 

 the local area that say, "We have 100 percent of the new system 

 in place," and you go out and look 5 years later and it turns out 

 nothing has changed. Rutskoi's people are in fact very afraid of 

 land reform because they argue that what's going on is nothing 

 more than another case of this, and in 5 years it will just be an- 

 other com campaign. Everybody will report they were growing com 

 successfully in the Arctic Circle, but we know they're not. This is 

 the governmental problem. There's no way to get policy imple- 

 mented except to tell everybody to do it. 



I interviewed a kolkhoz chairman recently who came to Duke, 

 who said, "We were called together and told Tou have a month to 

 reorganize your farm. Everybody in the district will do it. Go out 

 there and do it, guys.'" That's the standard policy implementation 

 method, and it, of course, leads to very good reports, but very little 

 real change, and it makes people enormously cynical about what 

 the state and the authorities that run their lives can or will do for 

 them. 



Mr. Penny. Mr. Pomeroy. 



Mr. Pomeroy. This has been the most profoundly depressing 

 panel I've ever heard. [Laughter.] 



Yet very insightful, and I appreciate your testimony this morn- 

 ing. I am a real novice not just to Congress, but also to the nuances 

 of Russian agrarian policy. 



Dr. Wegren, you mentioned something that intrigued me about 

 the new commodity exchange effort. Perhaps, it would seem to me, 

 agrarian reform might be advanced through market structures that 

 ultimately push back to the land itself more efficient means of pro- 

 duction. Can you assess whether the commodity exchange initiative 

 might somehow have that effect? 



Mr. Wegren. Essentially, overall in agrarian reform I tend to be 

 a pessimist, but there is one shining light of perhaps a small ray 

 of optimism, and that is these commodity exchanges, because, in 

 my opinion, at least, that's the one area where you have true mar- 

 ket forces at work. Essentially, you have market prices. A farmer 

 can sell his produce, whatever it may be, for decent prices. I'm 

 writing an article now on this issue. I haven't fully completed my 

 research, but from what I can tell, there's very little state regula- 

 tion of these commodity exchanges compared to Latin America or 

 Africa or some of these other areas. 



So it seems that we do have true market forces at work and that 

 this will in fact provide — I agree with you completely that this will 

 really provide incentives for farmers to grow more, knowing that 

 they can get a fair price for it without being told what to do, how 

 to do it, when to do it, and so on and so forth. So I think to the 



