Differences in Food Production and Food Consumption among the Republics of the Former Soviet Union

With the breakup of the former Soviet Union into 15 new states, the availability of food has become tremendously important to their leaders, eager to defend their newly won political powers and fearful of consumer unrest. Seven former republics—Ukraine, Byelarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—have 515accounted for larger shares of the former union’s food production in recent years than they have of its population. Of these, Ukraine is by far the biggest producer of food per capita, producing more meat, milk, grain, and vegetables than it consumes and exporting these products to its former Union partners. The other food exporters lacked Ukraine’s broad production capabilities, but their surplus output of some types of food provides them with the wherewithal for acquiring oil, gas, and industrial inputs via trade with other republics. Russia has been the largest food producer in absolute terms, but its need to import substantial amounts of food is one of its few vulnerabilities relative to the other former republics. Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan—the lowest consumers of food per capita of the former Soviet republics—are also the most dependent on imports for the food they consume. As such, they are the most at risk nutritionally as the former republics assert their independence.

The following discussion will briefly review differences among the various former republics in food production, in privatization as it relates to agricultural production, in food consumption, and in food processing and distribution, and it will discuss some of the implications of these differences. It will not address questions of potential republic self-sufficiency in food availability based on natural resources, either through production possibilities such as cropping pattern changes or through trade—with reciprocal products or in hard currency. In a world of highly economically interdependent states, as Schroeder so cogently points out: “The question of economic viability centers much less on the self-sufficiency of an economic territory than it does on the ability of that territory’s population to perform within the larger global economy.” ¹

At a cost—perhaps very high—any new nation-state can survive. The potential for doing so with trade and foreign investment is limited only by that nation-state’s own policies and stability.