Food and agriculture

Abstract

Agriculture policy has, since the fall of the Soviet Union, arguably never been as important in Russian life as it is today. Having taken the path of import substitution in 2014, Russia now faces the very complex challenge of providing food products for its population through predominantly national production. And yet the Russian agricultural sector is, notoriously, an extremely inertial part of the national economy. Successes in this sector have resulted only from gradual efforts accumulating over time. And still the fundamental problem of Russian agricultural policy remains, in the early twenty-first century as in many periods past, its inconsistency and excessive dependence on and exposure to high politics, as driven by geopolitical collisions and by transformations in Russia’s internal development model.