Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 2 – Preliminary results
of the 2016 agricultural census, released last week, show that the number of
farms in the Russian Federation fell by 38.4 percent in the ten years prior to that
date, largely but not exclusively as the result of the continuing shift from
small farms to larger agro-industrial operations.
This pattern f declining numbers and
increasing size was typical of all federal districts except one: the North
Caucasus FD. There the number of small farmers increased and there was little consolidation
into larger farms (icss.ru/otrasli-i-ryinki/agropromyishlennyij-sektor/vserossijskaya-selskoxozyajstvennaya-perepis-2016-g).
The trend outside the North Caucasus
is typical of what is happening with agriculture in many countries, especially
as the capital costs of farming have increased; and thus is no surprise. But
the fact that this trend has not extended to the North Caucasus is significant above
all for three political reasons.
First of all, it signals that rural
overpopulation in that region, the result of high growth rates, is becoming
even more serious with ever more people competing for a limited amount of land,
something that sparks conflicts within ethnic communities in homogeneous areas
and between them in mixed populations.
Second, it means that the rising incomes
in some rural areas elsewhere do not extent to the North Caucasus. Not only is
poverty there high, but it is increasing far beyond the capacity of the Russian
authorities to address it. As a result, ever more people there are prepared to
listen to the messages of radicals, including Islamist ones.
And third, because the possession of
land is so important a cultural phenomenon – one thinks of the attitudes Pearl Buck
described in The Good Earth – any redrawing of borders is more rather
than less likely to generate conflict. As important as borders were in Soviet
times, they are more important now especially as land shortages intensify.
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