COMMUNISTS & AGRICULTURE

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 September 1932, Page 7

COMMUNISTS & AGRICULTURE

COLLECTIVISED FARMS FAIL. Several recent speeches and statements by high Soviet officials indicate that the agricultural situation and its inevitable corollary, the food situation. are claiming a very large share .of the Government’s attention at the present time (writes the Moscow correspondent of the ‘Observer’). At a recent conference of the Ukrainian Communist Party Premier Molotov suggested that in Ukrainia agriculture had been neglected for the sake of industry, and sounded the public warning: “Without agricultural progress our industrial construction also cannot develop.” On the same occasion L.M. Kaganovitch, a member of the powerful Communist Party Political Bureau, indulged in very plain speaking about the functioning of some of.the collective farms, mentioning such features as “bad work, great losses in harvesting low productivity of labour, destruction of cows, and neglect of horses.” About the same time the Commissar for Agriculture, Mr Y. A. Yakovlev, published in ‘Pravda’ a long article recapitulating the main features of present-day Communist agrarian, policy, with special emphasis upon the points which may he interpreted as concessions and reassurances to the peasants. So Mr Yakovlev severely criticised local officials who endeavour to socialise the peasants’ cow and other domestic animals; pronounced against the practice of arbitrarily removing presidents of collective farms without consulting their members; reiterated the Government’s',promise that this year, after fulfilling reduced State requirements of grain and other products at fixed prices, the peasants will be free to sell his surplus as he pleases or to retain it for his own consumption.

Mr Yakovlev also stated that more gpanufactured goods would be thrown on the markets, as otherwise the greater freedom of trade granted to the peasants would have little practicalsignificance. A LAND OB' 1 CONTRASTS.

It has become a truism to say that Russia is a land of contrasts. But no contrast is more striking and at first eight moj-e puzzling than the one between the achievements which are officially claimed for the nation’s agriculture under the Five-year Plan and the obvious and acute food stringency, which during the last winter apd spring became more rather than less intense.

The Soviet-planted acreage, which I was 113,000,000 hectares in 1928, * amounted to 136,000,000 hectares in 1931 and 1932. Between January 1, 1929, and July 1, 1932, the number of tractors operating on Soviet fields grew from 29,000 to 146,000. Colleci tive farms now include 61 per cent. lof the peasant households, and, with State farms, accounted for 80 per cent, of the planted acreage last spring. Individual farming, the alleged backwardness of which was hitherto held responsible for Russia’s difficulties in the field of supply with food and raw material, is almost a thing of the past, especially in the basic grain-producing regions. Yet the acute shortage of things which Russia should be able to produce in abundance (bread, meat, sugar, potatoes) remains, and is particularly obvious if one strays away from Moscow and Leningrad and from the beaten tourist routes and makes a trip through provincial towns and country districts. When one has made full allowance for such factors as the growth of the towns, the stripping of the country for export purposes, the drought which affected Eastern Russia and Western Siberia last 'year, and the storage of food reserves for possible military contingencies ill the Far East, the inability of this great agricultural country to feed itself normally is not fully explained. The most fundamental cause in this connection is the failure of the collective farm system, as yet, to justify the high claims which were made for its productivity and efficiency. Immense losses (running up to 20 per cent, in some of the most highly mechanised State farms, and to still greater figures in many collective farms) have been sustained in harvesting the crops, and this has offset the gains in planted acreape. Mechanisation and collectivisation have become such fetishes of Soviet agrarian policy in the last years that the importance of the human element, of the peasant on whose labour the effectiveness of the tractor and the harvesting combine -depends, has been lost from view. The arbitrary powers which local officials assumed in regard to the collective farms; the vague relation between work and compensation in the new farms; most of all the. adoption of a system (which has only recently been relaxed and modified) under which the peasant was apt to find all and perhaps a little more than all his surplus crop demanded of him at fixed prices seriously undermined the working morale of the collective farm members The spring sowing was some •12,(F'0,000 acres below the plan and fsligl-Jy below last year’s, and the non fulfilment was especially noticeable in the fertile Ukraina, when; the food shortage was especially great lust winter and spring. The Soviet leaders are now endeavouring to execute a complicated economic manoeuvre, to cajole the peasant into greater productivity by offering him a number of concessions, while at the same time retaining the Collective farm, in its main features. The success of this manoeuvre de- . pends on a number of factors: the climatic conditions for this year’s harvest, the. amount of goods which can jbe thrown on the markets to meet the I peasants’ needs, the faith ot the pea- | sants in the permanence of the milder 1 new policy. Upon its success depends > the answer to the question whethm j the second Five-year Plan will start ,under somewhat more normal food conditions or whether the Russians must go through the fan?liar process of tightening their belts lor another ►hard winter.