AGRICULTURE AND THE COLD WAR

Some of us are children of the 1950s and 60s. I was born in 1945 so was immersed like many others of my generation in the cold war.  In grade school we were often told to get under our desks for air raid drills.  Some people built bomb shelters in their backyard.  We were instructed on what to do during an attack.  My mother and others listened to the Senator McCarthy hearings of the 1950s and the communist hysteria that existed during that time. We witnessed the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 where the US and the Soviet Union came close to a nuclear war. The space race only reinforced the rivalry between two ideologically opposed giants with the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957, the first manmade object in orbit. 

My own cold war involvement continued when I fulfilled my ROTC military obligation in the late 1960s in then West Germany as a young US Army Officer with NATO and the US Special Ammunition Support Command. The Command had administrative control then of all US Army units assigned to NATO forces with nuclear weapons.  We were always on alert to the threat from “the Eastern bloc.” It was the height of the Cold War period, and the Prague Spring of 1968 when Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia to prevent a reform movement by Alexander Dubcek, only heightened the concern and vigilance.

With the Russian invasion of the Ukraine it seems that the “Cold War” has reemerged.  I find myself revisiting the history of the Soviet bloc and how our world has changed. Prior to the establishment of the Soviet Union, imperial Russia was a net exporter of grain.  In the late 1920s, the new Soviet Union ruled that private residential estates had to become collective farms (Kolkhoz’s).  By 1970, one-half of the cultivated lands in the Soviet Union were collective farms and the rest were state owned. These farms collectively failed to reach the production goals laid out in each of the Soviet government’s five-year plans. This failure caused the Soviet Union to reach out to the United States for their domestic food needs. An example of the cruel efforts under Stalin to impose aggressively collective farms resulted in the famine in the Ukraine in 1932 and 1933.  Stalin’s effort to tramp down Ukrainian nationalism left an estimated 3.9 million people dead during this time.  An investigation of this Ukrainian famine was done by the US Congress in 1988.  It found that these deaths were a direct result of Stalin’s policies.

Due to the inability to grow domestically those food supplies needed to feed the country, the Soviet Union purchased, in 1972, 19 million tons of grain that included one-fourth of the entire US wheat crop. The now famous statement by then US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz to farmers to “plant fence row to fence row” only reinforced the drive to increase US crop production. In 1975, with another crop failure in the Soviet Union, the US and the Soviet Union signed a five-year agreement for the Soviet Union to purchase up to eight million metric tons per year of US corn and wheat.

In 1980, due the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, President Jimmy Carter put an embargo on grain to the Soviet Union, and also had the US boycott the summer Olympics in Moscow. The embargo had little impact on the grain needs of the Soviet Union as supplies were obtained from other countries which included most of South America. The embargo was lifted by President Reagan in 1981. I remember this period well, being a professional staff member of the US House Committee of Agriculture at that time. The tight money policies of the federal reserve to control inflation and also with record production and a glut of farm commodities caused a farm depression in the 1980s. It was said to be more severe than at any time since the great depression of the 1929 period. The dairy economy even in Vermont was not immune to this period as the old 75-80 percent of parity authorization that led to increased milk production over what the market could use during the 1970s was eliminated in the 1982 Federal Farm Bill, leading to several attempts after for ways to better stabilize supply and demand in the industry.

In the Soviet Union, communism, central planning, and collective farms had failed to meet their needs. The US responded by supply assistance.  For example, a New York Times article in 1991 said that the US was planning $1.5 billion in food aid to Soviet people’s through Moscow.  USAID had several US agriculture and Russian partnership ventures in the 1990s. Even Ben and Jerry’s (not owned by Unilever then) participated in 1994 in one USAID $700,000 partnership grant in building a plant in Karelia, a region in the Western part of Russia boarding Finland (they pulled out of this agreement in 1997). In the two decades since the end of the Cold War, and until booted out by Putin in 2012, $2.6 billion of US aid was provided to Russia through USAID.

During this time, I assisted with a USDA supported project by the National Cooperative Business Association in D.C. to help bring US food products into Voronezh, in Central Russia, near Ukraine. The concept was to bring US food products (canned goods) through the Black Sea up to Voronezh, thus helping with food needs in that region.  I remember my visit there and seeing the collective farms that were idled with the equipment pilfered and not working. We visited an ice cream factory, and I was told that they only made two flavors, which I tasted and when I asked why only two flavors, I was told that they tell the people what they need. They did not seek public input. Later I participated in further work in the former satellite countries of the Czech Republic, Hungry, and Poland, working with our Embassy officials helping to connect these  emerging markets with US food companies. During that time, it was clear that there was a great deal of excitement among businesses and others in breaking away from the yoke of the old Soviet system.  

The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9,1989 was a pivotal event in World history, and certainly in my generation.  It marked the fall of the so called “iron curtain” and the part of the world that faced me and others as NATO military personnel.  I remember the feeling of relief at the beginning of the end of the “Cold War.” The Wall coming down represented freedom, especially to those in the East who had been trapped behind it for so long.

Later after the fall of the Wall, I had a chance to travel to Berlin. I asked a young man on the street then if he knew where “check point Charlie” was, the point of access under the “iron curtain” between the West and East Berlin. He said yes, follow him as he was going to the museum that had information on the Wall and its history.  On the way, he told me that when the Wall went up, part of his family was on one side, and he and others were on the other and until the Wall came down, they had not been able to see each other.  He was on the way to the museum where he worked.  I have a piece of that  Wall today that I purchased at the museum, a vivid reminder of the old cold war period.

I am not a world food expert, but it is clear from the data, that the Black Sea region of which Ukraine is part has emerged as an important supplier of grains, oilseeds, and vegetable oils in the past thirty years.  The two countries, Russia and Ukraine, account for about 12 percent of the total calories traded in the World, principally cereals and oilseeds including wheat, barley, sunflowers, and maize.  Combined they produce 1/3 of all corn and cereal grains exported to the world market. In addition to Russia being the World’s third-largest producer of oil and second largest producer of natural gas, is also a major supplier of farm fertilizers.  

 

There is an old Native American saying,“Never make any decision without first looking seven generations to the past and seven generations to the future.” Looking to the past, it is evident that US agriculture, as well as the world’s agriculture, has been in constant change over a long period of time and that continues today.  The change has been influenced by events and policies at all levels, in Vermont too, from the subsistence farming period through agriculture today.

Through these years there has been many initiatives that have brought people and institutions together to identify critical needs and programs and policies needed to meet those needs. That remains true today. The recent events in Ukraine will likely change how the world economy operates for decades to come.  The World economy is more closely linked today than ever before in history, and COVID and the disruption in supply lines for goods only reinforced this. In the economy to include agriculture it illustrates the need to get away from the dependence upon fossil fuels both for energy use and as a source for fertilizers.  Recent climate reports by NOAA, the United Nations, National Geographic and others only reinforce both the challenges and opportunities ahead.  Historically, especially in Vermont, our strength in the market with agricultural products has often been associated with environmental stewardship related to clean water, soil health, and quality of the products produced. The recent Governor’s Commission on The Future of Vermont Agriculture Action Plan recently released is a worthy effort, but it is not the end of course. A unified structure of coordination, as occurred in WWI and WWII, of those agencies, academic and research institutions, and not for profits that have a mission relative to agriculture, food systems and the environment is badly needed today. With Covid and now the Ukraine invasion by Russia, the world economy, to include Vermont’s, will change and the state, and the nation, must prepare for it.  As the old Navy saying goes, “all hands are needed on deck,” and they need to be pulling in the same direction.

Background Sources for this blog:

• Iowa Pathway, The Farm Crisis of 1980’s
• International Food Policy Research Institute
• Coldwarheartland.ku.edu
• Military-hiustory.findom.com
• History.com
• US Congress, Commission on The Ukraine Famine 1932-33, N Report to Congress, April   22, 1988
• New York Times, “U.S. Planning $1.5 Billion in Food Aid to Soviet Republic Through Moscow, by Keith Bradsher, Nov. 21, 1991
• Agri Pulse, Memories of  U.S. Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz, by Sara Wyant, 
• The Soviet’s Five Year Plan(1981-1985), Issue Brief No. IB81025 by John Hardt and Donna Gold, Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service
• What Were Stalin’’s Five Year Plans? In https://www.historyhit.com
• The First Five Year Plan in the USSR at https://www.citeco.fr
• Revelations From The RUSSIAN ARCHIVES, Sections: Internal Workings of the Soviet System: The Soviet Union and the United States, at https://www.loc.gov
• www.socialismrealized.eu/1950s-collectivisation-of-agriculture
• NATO BATTERIES-Ed Thelen’s Nike Missile Web Site
• Ben and Jerry’s Bids a Bittersweet Farewell, in the Moscow Times by Jeremy Weinberg and Sujata Rao, The Moscow Times, Feb 13, 1997 
• Russia boots out USAID, by Natasha Abbakumova and Kelly Lally, in Washington Post, Sept. 18, 2012
• Interbizforum.com   Food Products-AGTEC
• First five-year plan, Wikipedia
• The Soviet Grain Embargo, by the Heritage Foundation Jan 2, 1981
• The Economist, Where will he Stop? Feb 26^th-March 4^th issue, and article on page 67-68, Russia invades Ukraine, The Economic fallout.
• The Militarization of Agriculture: Cold War, Foreign Aid, and the Expansion of the American Agricultural Welfare System Under President Eisenhower, by Alan Herbert Metzner, College of William and Mary, 2008
• Agriculture and Food Aid in U.S. Policymaking during the Cold War, by Kristin L. Ahlberg, Oxford University Press, 29 July 2019
• The Family Farm in the Post-World War 11 Era: Industrialization, the Cold War, and Political Symbol, A Dissertation, by Ryan Stockwell, Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia, August 2008