A Troubled Realm: Russian Agriculture's Spatial Constraints, Variance, and Prospects for Revival

Radford University, Radford VA

Investigators

Abstract

This project explores the development constraints faced by Russian agriculture. The project will quantify three critically important constraints with strong spatial dimensions (physical environment, burden of space, and rural demographics), help to understand their implications, and evaluate prospects for Russia's agricultural development through the prism of these constraints. Previously, explanations of Russian farming's failures have been mostly based on aspatial socio-economic factors such as incentives, ownership, and communal forms of life. However, low efficiency and poor production outcomes have survived at least three changes in the dominant socio-economic order and this provides motivation for an alternative explanation. The research methodology will combine multivariate statistical analysis, field observations, and GIS. The latter will be used to juxtapose place-specific estimates of agricultural development constraints and to produce relevant and informative maps. The study will involve two spatial scales: European Russia as a whole and three diverse provinces of European Russia in particular. Following the delimitation of "marginal" lands, factors of agricultural variance within non-marginal spaces will be explored. These factors are fertility of the soil, accessibility to major urban cores, and market conversion. It will be shown how their combined effect produces differential productivity in the Russian agricultural system. The research will challenge aspatial and Human Geography insensitive explanations of Russian agricultural travails and contribute to knowledge about transitioning to market economy. The "breaking news mentality" of the 1990s whereby the Russian scene was viewed through the prism of upheavals and political personalities, rather than long-term processes and their historical and geographical antecedents and roots, will also be challenged. The study will establish an example of a replicable framework for presenting both the data and results of our spatial statistical and cartographic analysis. The databases assembled in the process of this research will be fully documented and published in a software-independent format, queryable across the Internet and useable by other researchers in the field. This design will contribute to the ongoing development of research infrastructure to enable integration of results from diverse area and case studies.