RUSSIA’S HARVEST

Taranaki Daily News, 17 October 1934, Page 12

RUSSIA’S HARVEST

OFFICIAL ESTIMATES

RESTRICTIONS NOT UNDERSTOOD.

the LONGEST IN HISTORY. According to official statistics, states the Manchester Guardian, the Soviet grain crop of 1933 was the largest in Russia’s history, amounting to 89,800,000 tons, as against 83,540,000 tons in 1930, the previous bumper year, and 80,100,000 tons in 1913, which was the best pre-war year. (The comparison with 1913 is based, of course, on the present area of the Soviet Union, not on the yield of the -former Russian Empire.) , , a , Between 1925 and 1930 harvests fluctuated between a low level of 71,740,000 tons in 1929 and a high level of 78,320,000 tons in 1928, In the lean years of >1931 and 1932 the harvest yields are officially stated as 69,480,000 tons and 69,870,000 tons respectively; both Soviet and foreign unofficial estimates were inclined to place the figure for 1932 much lower. A number of puzzling questions arise in connection with the official claim of a record crop in 1933, states the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. In the first place, as the writer can testify from a trip which he made last autumn in Ukrania and the North Caucasus, definite famine conditions, with a mortality that generally averaged around 10 per cent, and that rose in the worse-affected villages to 20 or 30 per cent., prevailed over wide areas in these normally rich grain-producing regions during the winter of 1932-33, and especially in the spring of 1933. While this year’s crop, especially in Ukrania, was above the average, and it was general testimony that a considerable improvement had been registered by comparison with 1932, the heavy losses in man-power and in animalpower (the latter, incidentally, has been diminishing ever since 1929), scarcely seem consistent with the best harvest m Russia’s history. . WHY THE RESTRICTIONS? If one could accept without question the official figure of a harvest of approximately 90,000,000 tons, the maintenance of the existing restrictions on the sale end consumption of bread would be difficult to explain. If Russia between 1925 end 1930 could feed its population without rationing restrictions on harvests that ranged around 75,000,000 tons a year, it is not easily comprehensible why rationing must be maintained in the face of a harvest of 90,000,000 tons, especially when no substantial amount of grain is being shipped abroad. AU these considerations lend special interest to an article which Mr. N. Ossinsky, head of the Central Statistical Department, published in Izvestia of September 21, 1933, describing the methods which were used in estimating the harvest yield. The author defines three kinds of harvest yields. These are (1) the biological yield, that is, the amount of grain on the fields, without deduction for losses; (2) the granary yield, the amount which arrives in the granary minus unavoidable technical losses and avoidable losses; (3) the normal yield, “the amount of grain which can be coUected from a hectare minus unavoidable technical losses.” Of these three yields it would seem that only the “granary yield” is a hard-and-fast tangible reality, capable of being weighed and measured. Both the “biological yield” and the “normal economic yield leave a wide field for guesswork and conjecture. Mr. Ossinsky, however, firmly rules out the granary yield as a basis for harvest computations. This, he says, “would mean, in essence, the facing of the so-called ‘usual,’ that is, outrageous and inadmissibly high losses, the objective situation which we always try to change by our subjective attempts.” , Consequently, the official figure of 89,800,000 tons was arrived at by taking the “normal economic yield," and this in turn was reached by deducting 10 per cent, from the estimate of the biological yield, “when the latter was measured accurately.” “In other cases the normal economic yield was regarded as identical with the biological yield.”

A SIGNIFICANT ADMISSION. Ossinsky makes the significant admission that the threshing statistics did not tally, as a general rule, with the “normal economic yield,” which seems to have been a decidedly abstract, not to say metaphysical, conception. In the case of the winter wheat crops of four regions, for instance, there was a discrepancy of 37 per cent., the “normal economic yield bping 11.8 centners per hectare, and the amount actually threshed 7.4 centners per hectare. More than this, Ossinsky writes: “In most cases the threshings proved to be 30, 40 or 50 per cent, lower than the estimated ‘biological crop.’” In other words, the sole concrete test, the threshing, indicated that the margin between the theoretical biological yield and the actual amount of grain which arrived in Soviet granaries was vastly more than the 10 per cent, discount which Ossinsky allowed for his “normal economic yield.” In the true spirit of statistics on the class front,” the Ural provincial representative in the Central State Commission for determining the harvest yield, Sefronyenka, expressed “a very sharp but correct” idea about the threshing statistics. He said that this idea as a whole represented new attempts of the kulaks to deceive the Soviet Government. x,_ x xl-_ In general, it seems obvious that the official figure of 89,800,000 tons would scarcely be accepted by any body which did not subscribe to the idea of “statistics on the class front,” since it clearly failed to meet the sole practicable test, the statistics of threshing. All that can be said with safety about the Soviet harvest of 1933, in view of Mr. Ossinsky’s highly-criginal methods of computation, is that it e 'idently ed some improvement on the crop of a crop which lead to ghastly, widespread famine. At the same time, one cannot overlook the significant fact that the harvest of 1933, whatever its real figure may have been, has not permitted the abolition of rationing restrictions, which did not exist when the Soviet Union, its statistical services not yet under the control of exponents of the “class point of view, was averaging crops of about J 5.000.000 tons. -