Why did the USSR import grain?

Stamp for the Fourth Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union showing the harvesting of grain, 1948

One of the constant refrains of anti-Soviet, anti-socialist propagandists both back in the 1980s and to this day centers around how Soviet agriculture was allegedly inefficient and in crisis. This is always based on highly misleading data taken completely out of context.

For example, anti-socialists will often simplistically claim that the USSR "had to import grain" as some big "aha moment" that supposedly shows that the collective farm system failed. First, this ignores the nature of the USSR and its internal economics. After the counterrevolution the great union was broken up into many capitalist nation states and grain shipments and sales within that union from republics like the Ukrainian SSR and the RSFSR that would have been internal to the union would now be shown as "exports" for Ukraine and the Russian Federation today.

But more importantly, as this short article from Socialism: Theory and Practice in 1981 notes, it also ignores the differing nature and priorities of socialist and capitalist economics. Socialist economics prioritizes human needs. Capitalist economics prioritizes profits. Capitalist economies will export goods even if they are needed within their own countries, will export grain and food even if people internally are living in food insecurity or going hungry.

This essential difference is central to the facts in this case and is part of what is outlined in this piece:

Text:

Over the past few years in scanning Western newspapers and periodicals one more and more frequently comes across materials whose authors allege that foodstuff purchases by Soviet foreign trade organizations from other countries, which sharply increased during the past decade, are an indication of serious difficulties in Soviet agriculture.

The Western mass media exploit the well-known fact that foreign markets are being increasingly drawn upon as an additional source for food procurement in pursuance of the objective set by the Soviet Union of steadily and continuously advancing the people's well-being.

However, the growing Soviet food purchases from other countries in no way attest to any '’serious difficulties" in the agricultural sector of the Soviet economy. Let us take meat, for example. Over the past fifteen years meat production has increased rapidly, it registered a gain of 60 percent and totaled 15.1 million tonnes in 1980. But this increase with the relatively low retail prices on meat, unchanged since 1961, plus the fact that the people's income is rising fast, is not sufficient to meet in full the domestic demand. Of the two possible ways: the limiting meat products consumption by raising prices or the search for additional supplies from the world market, the Soviet state decided upon the latter. From 1970 to 1979 Soviet meat imports increased from 165,000 to 611,000 tonnes per annum.

Another false "argument" to support the thesis on the "crisis" of agriculture in the USSR has gained currency in the West. The bourgeois mass media often manipulate the fact that in the past few decades the USSR turned from a major grain exporter into a grain importer. But in citing this incontrovertible fact these falsifiers conceal the true reasons behind this, of which at least two should be mentioned.

For twenty years after the war the USSR put on the external market tens of millions of tonnes of grain, over half of which, mainly wheat, was sent to socialist countries. The truth is that in the first postwar years a number of socialist countries experienced grave food difficulties due to the low efficiency of small-commodity farming at the time and for other reasons. And the Soviet Union true to the principles of proletarian internationalism, at a great sacrifice to its own vital requirements, supplied large quantities of grain to these countries to fully provide their people with bread. Thus, 34 million tonnes of cereals were supplied to the GDR, 32 million tonnes to Czechoslovakia, 16 million tonnes to Poland. Besides, in the first postwar years the Soviet Union had a much smaller output of export-oriented commodities than today, it sorely needed export earnings and was compelled to sell grain outside the socialist world even though it was badly needed here.

The second reason is tied in with the ''meat problem" being solved today. A significant growth of grain imports in the recent decade was due to the accelerated development of livestock farming. Speculations rife in the West in connection with the significant fodder grain purchases made by the Soviet Union abroad are utterly groundless. Grain production in the USSR has been growing at a fairly brisk pace. In 1961-1965 annual grain output averaged 130 million tonnes; in the tenth five year period (1976-1980) it exceeded an average of 200 million tonnes. In grain production the Soviet Union ranks third in the world, next to the USA and China.

Consequently, facts show that the conversion of the USSR, once a food exporter, into a food importer is in no way indicative of any weakness of its agriculture; what they do indicate is the significant growth of the material and financial capabilities of the Soviet state which is now able to allocate significant foreign exchange resources to rapidly advance the people’s well-being and supply better quality foodstuffs for the population from additional sources.