ABSTRACT
Regional attempts to maintain consumer-price subsidies also complicate food supplies because of interregional arbitraging. In 1989, the state agricultural management bureaucracy was reorganized, creating the State Commission on Food Supplies and Procurements. Planning, procurement and supply functions were pushed down from the all-union level to the individual republics. A fall in the percentage of the grain crop procured may not mean there will be a drop in the immediate availability of food supplies. The Russian government resorted to a mobilization campaign—just as the Soviet regime did every year after collectivization—to bring in the 1992 harvest. The agrarian reform has progressed to the point where farm workers on many good, prosperous farms in Southern Russia are demanding the right to leave their large farm with their shares of its land and capital as the land reform legislation allows them to do.
