Author: Ralph A. Thompson

Publisher:

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 38

ISBN-13:

The Food Program announced by the Communist Party Central Committee in May 1982 is a major effort to increase per capita consumption of quality food, especially the supply of meat and poultry products. The United States currently supplies about one-third of Soviet grain imports and there is good potential for this share to increase further, if the US can regain credibility as a reliable grain supplier. A convincing argument can be made that distinct political advantage accrues to that country which has abundant agricultural commodities and through long-term trade relationships elicits from the other a degree of dependence for their food imports. The vagaries imposed on the Soviet agricultural sector by weather, centralized management, farmworker productivity, and ruble constraints probably means that the USSR will be a major importer of agricultural commodities for the foreseeable future. The planned per capita consumption of meat and poultry by 1990 will still fall 18 pounds short of Soviet nutritional norms and will be about 66 pounds short of current annual US consumption. In a country where military priorities have been allowed to dominate domestic policies to the point where canning of food is limited by the shortage of steel to make cans, there will certainly be much study in the Kremlin over guns-or-butter issues in the years ahead.