Russia Needs to Make Better Use of Its Fallow Land

It is hard to imagine a more wilderness-filled stretch of land between two major cities.  The city of Khabarovsk, population half a million, and Komsomolsk, population 300,000, are separated by a two-lane highway running through a beautiful piece of untouched nature.  On a clear autumn drive, the eight-hour drive is an almost unbroken forest of yellow-leaved trees, with white, strong, and thick trunks as far as the eyes can see.  They are only punctuated by the occasional tributaries of the mighty Amur River.

And those tributaries show just how well-watered the land is.  The little streams and rivers are almost always accompanied by marshlands, with their thick wild grass covering the land, so densely that not one part of the soil can be seen from above.  With the land so flat, the forest and the marshy grassland merge on the horizon in the distance, making the highway, the motor vehicles, and all their passengers feel in significantly small specks in the majestic landscape.

And aside from those vehicles and their passengers, the 400 km between the two cities are completely devoid of human residence aside from a few pit stops serving the passing vehicles.  In no part of the land is agricultural activities evident, even though there is no shortage of freshwater for irrigation and consumers willingly to pay for produce only few hours away from any farmland in the area.  The highway between the two cities serve as the perfect conduit to get produce quickly to the market.

The situation is all the more perplexing considering that many of the fresh vegetables sold throughout the Russian Far Eastern cities are imported from across the border in China.  With global warming, plenty of freshwater, and endless flatlands perfect for mechanized agriculture, it is difficult to see a place with more potential for productive agriculture than this piece of land along the Amur River.  Yet, no farmers have established themselves, even in areas immediately next to the two major cities.

The previous research trip has already established a few reasons for why agricultural potential in the region is wasted.  Many Chinese migrants have expressed the desire to utilize the plentiful land in the region, but they are largely held back by legal constraints of land ownership, residential status, and control over importation of necessary inputs for agriculture, whether they are seeds, fertilizers, or tools for production.  As is the case for any business in the region, without strong ties with the political establishment, large-scale operations are next to impossible.

For Russians, who can get free land in the region under the much ballyhooed Far East Hectare Program, the prospect of running a farm just does not seem all that attractive.  On one hand, the need for political ties to run a business applies to Russians just as it does to foreigners, and few Russians in the urbanized industrial region has prior experience doing agricultural work for a living.  Growing vegetables for sustenance on a dacha is one thing, but to depend on a large farm for profit is entirely something else.

But like so much of the untapped resources in the Russian Far East, the attractiveness of the fallow land only increases over time.  Strategically, better use of the land can turn Russia into an agricultural giant that has every potential to become a global exporter like the US and Brazil.  Agricultural exports can provide the country, overly dependent on oil and natural gas, a lucrative alternative source of foreign income, especially considering that it lies right next to major agricultural importers like China and Japan.

The Russian Far East evidently has neither the human resources nor the capital to undertake such a project by itself.  The Kremlin, as it has done with the country's natural resources, need to put the state's and connected oligarchs' explicit backing to get the project off the ground.  In absence of skilled farmers, the government will need to provide the necessary legal structures to import more foreign guest workers and prepare to pay them good wages to live in the middle of nowhere.  The initial investment will be expensive, but the financial and strategic returns will easily compensate for the money spent.