Soviets short of meat

Press, 11 January 1978, Page 5

Soviets short of meat

NZPA-Reuter Moscow. The Soviet Union has still failed to remedy acute meat shortages which hit the country after the disastrous 1975 grain harvest, the official press has indicated. Kremlin concern about the lack of good-quality meat in the shops and about lagging meat production by collective and State farms has been reflected by the Communist Party daily, “Pravda,” and the main farming newspaper, “Selskaya Zhizn.” The Soviet Union has become one of New Zealand’s biggest meat-buying customers in recent years. “Pravda” gave prominence to a letter from a worker in Ryazan, central Russia, who complained that fatty pork was the most common fare in local butcher’s shops while beef, mutton, or poultry were rare and of poor quality. The newspaper coupled the worker’s letter with

an appeal to readers to submit ideas for resolving the problem. The official Soviet press usually concentrates on particular local cases on the rare occasions it draws attention to a national problem. The Soviet Union has long suffered from meat shortages. Foreign resri dents in- some cities have not seen any meat in the shops since last summer. The failure of the 1975 harvest brought cattle-fod-der shortages and a widespread slaughtering of livestock. A year later, the Communist Party chief, Mr Leonid Brezhnev, signalled a new emphasis in Soviet agricultural policy — a campaign to boost individual private plots, which produce onethird of the country’s milk and meat. The “Pravda” letter

from the Ryazan worker suggested that a cause of shortages was the decline in the number of privately kept animals on private plots. Where once villagers raised cows, piglets, and other animals they now went to town for their meat, and it was rare to find a privately woned cow, he said, adding that obtaining young animals and the fodder for them should be made easier. “Selskaya Zhizn” revealed another shortcoming with a sweeping criticism of the inability of farm workers to adapt to mechanisation of their work. The technology on stock-raising farms was no more complicated than at a factory, but workers were not receiving the same training as they did in industry, it said.