Traditionally, Westerners interested in small-scale agricultural research and extension have found themselves working in the non-white world. This is partly because Eastern Europe's role as "the original Third World," as Chomsky puts it, has been temporarily derailed and obscured by the installation of Marxist-Leninist regimes in those countries.
I have an interest in participant observation of Russian grass-roots food security initiatives which is primarily neither academic nor charitable. I am dissatisfied with the received wisdom that knowledge flows from a stable core to a struggling periphery. The most valuable and macroscopic lessons will probably flow from a liberated periphery to a destabilized core.
Russia finds itself in a protracted but fundamental period of transition in which it confronts problems ranging from the dissolution of the political narrative to shortages of energy and capital. The problems themselves are not uncommon; what seems unique about Russia's present position is that it previously enjoyed high international and domestic status as a military/industrial power. I think the loss of this status counts as a historical first which should be studied for lessons that may be applicable to other industrial societies approaching economic and ecological crisis.
In particular, I am interested in the combination of technical and social-political solutions needed to provide food to an urbanized population given the reduced-input conditions presently characterizing post-Soviet agriculture. Capital and energy are in short supply nationwide. One visitor who went over with the FFA reports that five tractors are needed to put together one that functions, fuel is scarce, hydraulic fluid nonexistent. Animal power is a likely candidate for a partial solution, but seems even more of a lost art there than in the West. It could enable producers to persist in the face of a hostile, or nonexistent, input market, and help communities exert better control over the food supply and its requisite energy and capital inputs. This as a matter of fact is the major reason the Amish use animals. They offer a degree of independence from petroleum and heavy manufacturing.
In order both to separate and defend our projects from capitalist relations, we need food security systems that can function independently of market pressures. I see the decommodification of food as being especially pertinent to Russia in two ways; first, in that for-profit enterprises of every sort are plagued by Mafia attention. I would rather see these elements defeated through a drying-up of hard currency circuits than through the present policy of increased police and surveillance assets, which I see as being predicated on an unrealistically incorruptible state power.
Secondly, many people doing extension or consulting work in Russia focus on improving growers' situations by helping them get higher prices- in a country which appears to be underfed and undernourished. The class conflict over what counts as "better prices" appears to go completely unexamined. EcoNiva, for example, in seeking entry for its growers into Western Europe's organic food market, seems to be reproducing a classic Third World export-cropping system.
Traditionally in Russia there existed a land tenure system called the Obshchina (commune) where land was held essentially as a village community trust and individuals could work it through their own labor by right of usufruct as opposed to absolute property. The proper name of this system was the "repartitional commune," since the land would be redivided among all families every ten years or so as the size of the families changed. This was disastrous because as land quality varies, families were often given multiple non-contiguous plots sometimes miles removed. Commuter farming sucks, even in the age of cars. However, it is important to note that this problem resulted from the individualist element of the system and not from the communist element. If the land had been worked in common and not just held in common, production could have been organized much more rationally and everybody would have had less work.
I would prefer to deal with autonomous groups or enterprises operating as collective or cooperative endeavors independent of state control or support. Probably I will settle for some approximation, but one at least has to start with an ideal.
these were suggested in part by Christina Glaser.