December 9, 2014

Are Russias Sanctions

GOING ORGANIC?
Vladamir Putins
import restrictions
pushing for
local & organic
food production

PLUS:
ORGANIC: ON THE VERGE
OF GOING GLOBAL?

THE SUN NEVER SETS ON

MONSANTO: THE STORY OF
A MODERN EMPIRE
LOCAVORES: THE
BEGINNING OF A LOCAL
FOOD MOVEMENT

WORLD

ORGANIC
WINS

Putins ongoing Feud with the West has

sparked a new interest in organic food
production throughout Russia.
By Neil MacFarquhar

Boris Akimovs cellphone,

which quacks like a duck, started
to sound like a whole flock soon
after President Vladimir V. Putin
imposed sweeping food sanctions
barring many Western imports
last August.
Major Russian grocery chains,
desperate to find new suppliers, tracked down Mr. Akimov,
the founder of Russias fledgling
farmtotable movement, to ask
urgent supply questions. How
many chickens and eggs could he
provide, they wanted to know,
and could he deliver 100 tons of
cheese, say, immediately?
Mr. Akimov, 36, had to turn
them away his 100 farmers produce nowhere near the
amounts requested.
LavkaLavka, the organic farm
cooperative he and a friend set up
about five years ago, sells between
six and 12 tons of artisanal cheese
annually, for example.
The main thing which the
sanctions have already changed
is in peoples minds in government, in business and on
the streets, they have started to
think more about where their
food comes from, Mr. Akimov
said during an interview in his
new, homey restaurant in central
Moscow.
If the sanctions give a chance
to develop local farmers, to develop sustainable agriculture, it
is very good. But I am not sure it

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December 9, 2014

will happen.
In August, Russia banned all
beef, pork, fish, fruit, vegetables
and dairy products from the European Union, the United States,
Canada, Australia and Norway
for one year, retaliating for Western economic sanctions imposed
afterthe Kremlin destabilized
Ukraine.
Senior leaders, starting with Mr.
Putin, heralded food sanctions as
a chance for Russians to finally
stock their larders with homegrown products.
Dmitri A. Medvedev, the prime
minister, released a road map
for agriculture last month.

DEB LINDSEY

Differences between organic and conventional

produce

The aim of our efforts is to

increase our own agricultural
produce and to reduce Russias
dependence on food imports, he
said.
But the content of the road map
was basically watch this space,
with new agricultural policies
promised by the end of 2015.
Critics said the government
typically announced the sanctions
first and thought about the fallout
afterward.
A range of experts and organizations noted that beyond the
populist, patriotic speeches about
growing food locally, there is
minimal government support
when it comes to supplying the
new land, longterm credit and
transportation logistics that Russian farmers desperately need to
expand.
Flying over Frances Cognac
region two years ago, Mr. Akimov
noticedthat every field, every lake,
every copse was neatly groomed
and exploited there was no
space for new projects. If you
looked at Russia there is nothing,
nothing, nothing you can do
everything, he said.
Russian agriculture basically
collapsed twice in the 20th century.
Immediately after the revolution, the new Bolshevik government organized what amounted
to gangs licensed to strip the
countryside of anything edible
to feed the agitated urban poor.
Output dropped to half what it
had been in 1913.
Production had just recovered
when forced collectivization
started in 1928. Stalin decided
that Russian grain exports would

SERGEY PONOMAREV

Boris Akimov, who runs LavkaLavka, an organic farm cooperative, hopes that with the ban on Western imports, Russians will explore local foods.

underwrite largescale industrialization, and by 1937, 90 percent

of Russian farmers had been
pushed onto collective farms.
Those who resisted were killed or
sent to the gulag.
After the Soviet Union disintegrated, the government advanced
largescale corporate farming and
basically favored imports.
Peasants have always been
secondclass citizens during the
czarist era, during Soviet times
and still today, said Vladimir
V. Miloserdov, an agriculture
expert raised on a collective farm
in southern Russia, who vividly
recalls the maximum two sacks
of grain his family received as its
annual salary.
In the last 20 years, more than
106 million acres of arable land
have fallen out of production, Mr.
Miloserdov said, and Russia has
fewer cattle now than it did in the
1940s.
Experts agree that is a sorry
state of affairs for the largest

country on earth.
Far from spurring production, sanctions so far have served
mostly to raise food prices.
Inflation has risen to 8.3 percent this year, well above the
anticipated 6 percent, with the
rise attributed to escalating food
prices as local producers exploit
shortages or importers pass on
the costs of shipping in salmon
from places like Chile instead of
nearby Norway.
Prices for meat and poultry rose
more than 18 percent through
October, while dairy products
were up by over 15 percent, according to the federal statistics
agency, Rosstat.
Russia cannot provide itself
with dairy products, fish, vegetables and other types of food, said
Mikhail Anshakov, the head of
the Society for the Protection of
Consumer Rights, which calls for
food sanctions to be rescinded.
Selfimposed sanctions under
these circumstances were mad-

ness.
The public has generally supported the sanctions, however,
because the Kremlin wrapped
the idea in nationalist colors,
and staterun television regularly
broadcasts programs showing
supermarkets bursting with
goods from Africa, Asia and Latin
America.
While the foreign news media
tend to focus on the dismay of
the urban elite over the sudden
dearth of oysters and foie gras,
Mr. Anshakov said, the real story
is the potential gap in providing
staples like milk.
Dairy farms have plenty of forage at the end of summer, he said,
but with winter comes the main
challenge to farming in Russia
virtually the entire country freezes. At that point dairy companies
usually import vast amounts of
powdered milk to mix with real
milk, Mr. Anshakov said.
Now with the sanctions that is
impossible, he said, with pow-

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WORLD
dered milk from traditional suppliers barred.
Some farmers, however, have
been slightly gleeful about their
prospects under sanctions.
Justus Walker, an American
immigrant farmer in Siberia,
became a YouTube sensation for
a short news clip showing him
laughing at the thought that he
could finally sell the mozzarella
he produces because the cheaper
Italian variety would no longer be
available.
Chicken is another example.
Only about 10 percent of chickens
sold in Russia come from abroad,
mostly from the United States.
Sanctions were a gold mine for
local producers as imports no
longer kept prices down.
But experts said that over the
long run higher prices would not
overcome more basic problems
faced by small local farmers like
those who sell through LavkaLavka. (Lavka means little shop in
Russian.)
Andrey Ovchinnikov, 53,
worked as an interior designer
when a friends endeavor persuaded him to become a chicken
farmer. Sales went well, but he

could get neither the credit nor

the land to expand.
He raises thousands of birds on
less than an acre. Since his farm
sits about 50 miles from Moscow,
prime country for dachas, the local government has been reluctant to give him land it can sell at
a premium.
After almost a year of cajoling,
he finally persuaded local officials to at least visit his farm this
month. I cannot say the government is really paying attention to
agriculture yet, but at least they
are looking in our generaldirection, he said.
LavkaLavka has made getting
that attention its mission.
The cooperative started after
Mr. Akimov, then the creative
director for an online magazine,
and his friend Sasha Mikhailov,
an information technology specialist, started paging through
the most famous cookbook from
czarist times, A Gift to Young
Housewives. The two men kept
stumbling across unfamiliar root
vegetables like rutabagas, parsnips and scorzonera.
When you read this book you
wonder how many interesting

At the moment Lavkalavka operates five shops, two cafes, and a restaurant filled with
farm products.

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December 9, 2014

things there were, how many delicious things we had here in Russia that disappeared during the
Soviet period, Mr. Akimov said.
The two began rooting around
in farmers markets near Moscow
for ingredients, and eventually their hobby changed from
a hedonistic project to a social
project to support local, organic
farmers, Mr. Akimov said. They
now run five shops, two small
cafes and a restaurant.
Members of the collective
hope sanctions stick around
long enough for Russians to start
exploring their own food, not just
substitute imports from China or
Turkey for what once came from
the United States and Europe.
To try to speed that process,
LavkaLavka has started monthly
food festivals celebrating something local. This month it is the
parsnip, which is called pasternak
in Russian, just like the surname
of the Doctor Zhivagoauthor.
If you ask a Russian what is a
pasternak, he will say a famous
writer, Mr. Akimov said, It is a
vegetable, but nobody knows it.

Why Should You Buy Organic?

AFISHA.RU

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