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A Sanunary Review of the Food and Agriculture Situation 

 in Russia and The Former Soviet Union 



Statement by Philip M. Raup 



L Introduction 



A lasting impression upon any visitor to the former Soviet Union who comes from the 

 United Sutes is how very much aHke the two areas are. This similarity exists in several dimensions, 

 apart from the topographic 



One is the similarity in attitudes toward space and time. Unlike western Europe, transport 

 costs are a mi^or part of total production costs in American and in what was the USSR. Each 

 European nation lies within a single time zone; it takes four time zones to cross the continental 

 U.S., six time zones to include Hawaii and most of Alaska, and seven to pick up Alaska's western 

 tips. It takes eleven time zones to encompass the former Soviet Umon. 



■This time-dlstance relationship breeds a consciousness of wide variations in climate, land 

 use and politics, in both America and the states of the former Soviet Union (FSU). It also yields 

 a sense of remoteness from centers of power. The attitudes of ranchers in New Mexico or wheat 

 growers in Montana toward Washington have much in common with views of Moscow held by 

 sheep herders in Uzbekstan or Kazakh wheat and barley growers. Government is far away. 



Consider only the Russian Federation. It Indudes an area well over twice the size of the 

 continental U.S. Its population of 150 million is 74 percent urban, virtually the same as 75 percent 

 in Europe and 75 percent in the United States, but the contrasts between urban and niral are 

 perhaps sharper than in any other industrial country. 



Consider one state, Kazakhstan. It is 3.9 times the size of Texas, 6.6 times the size of 

 California, and includes an area equal to 35 percent of the continental U.S. Its capital city, Alma 

 Ata, near the Chinese border, is some 1500 miles from its northwestern border, approximately the 

 distance from Dallas, Texas, to San Frandsco. California. The spatial problems of governance are 

 awesome. 



n. Some Key Economic Variables 



The task of restructuring the economy of the former Soviet Union must begin with a 

 recognition that it was a colonial empire, held together by mllitaty force, and organized along semi- 

 feudal lines. Its reorganization is triggering three simultaneous revolutions: 



1.) The severing of feudal-like relationships between the rulers and those ruled 

 2.) The severing of colonial ties between the central power and the colonics 

 3.) A religious reformation 



The states emerging from the Soviet Union, in short, are experiendng the trauma that in 

 Western Europe was associated with the break-up of feudalism, the Reformation, and 

 decolonization. This is telescoping five centuries of Western European evolution into a few years. 



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