Knowledge and agrarian de-collectivisation in Kazakhstan

Abstract

The agrarian de-collectivisation in Kazakhstan is an instructive case for examining the relative viability of large-scale farming vis-à-vis smallholder agriculture. Within the transition from communism to capitalism in Kazakhstan, de-collectivisation involved not only a redefinition of property rights but also a dramatic rupture with former modes of agricultural knowledge generation and use. Up to now, however, the role of knowledge and skills in shaping de-collectivisation has received scant attention in the literature on postsocialism. This article argues that the loss and inadequacy of knowledge, following the collapse of knowledge institutions and the shift from large-scale knowledge-intensive mechanised farming to predominantly manual farming on small plots, needs to form part of any explanation of the postsocialist agrarian crisis. The analysis shows the importance of studying access to, and control over, knowledge in constructing a theory of agricultural labour processes.

Keywords:

• postsocialism
• de-collectivisation
• knowledge loss
• agricultural labour process
• Kazakhstan
• social security
• nostalgia
• collective farming

Notes

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their very useful comments.

¹This study is based on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 111 respondents in two regions of Kazakhstan: the Semey region in the northeast and the Almaty region in the southeast. The respondents included currently active farmers, ex-collective farm workers, agricultural researchers, local and central government officials, and agri-business representatives.

²Griffin et al. (2002) associate the decline of agricultural output during the transformation of the former Soviet Union with macroeconomic imbalances, very high rates of inflation, falling rates of investment, a declining level of mechanisation, and falling labour productivity. They argue that the failure of land reform, i.e. the continuing dominance of collective farming, is related to the absence of institutions (land market, state procurement, input markets, etc.) to support smallholders.

³Individual buyers had up to 10 years to pay for the plots of land but they could only sell, lease, and mortgage land after full payment. Individuals leasing land had to be personally engaged in farming and had no rights to sub-lease as had previously been permitted. Owners and lessees can either farm individually or contribute their land to the land-stock of other legal entities engaged in agriculture, with the lessee having to be employed by that particular entity.

⁴Neither can one speak of post-communist peasants who opposed the privatisation of land, an argument that some commentators have used to explain why full commoditisation took so long (cf. Wegren 2006 for a critical discussion). Wegren (2004) argues against characterising the lack of adaptive behaviour amongst former collective farm workers in Russia to the new conditions as resistance. Likewise, the criticisms within this quote cannot be seen as ‘weapons of the weak’ (cf. Jansen and Roquas 2002).

⁵The starting document, the ‘State Agro-Food Programme for 2003–2005’ (‘Years of Village’) formulated in 2002, aimed to meet national food security by assisting agricultural producers. The results of this programme are contested. While some Kazakhstani authors (e.g. Omarbakiev and Momynbaev 2006, Sabirova et al. 2005) and official reports claim its success, some members of parliament have questioned this (e.g. Serik Abdrakhmanov on 28 March 2007: ‘I must say that discontent in rural areas is growing, where market reforms and “Years of Village” initiated by the government did not reach its objectives’). Further policy documents followed: the ‘State Programme for Development of Rural Areas in 2004–2010’ and a policy document on ‘On the Sustainable Development of the Agro-Industrial Complex of the Republic of Kazakhstan in 2006–2010’.

⁶Many of these crop production farms are relatively new, especially in the northern wheat belt. The ‘Virgin Land’ programme turned large areas of Kazakhstan's pasturelands into one of the major grain-producing regions of the Soviet Union. Between 1954 and 1964, about 25 million ha of virgin land were turned over to cereal production, mostly using labourers migrated from Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of the Soviet Union. The programme also drew in a sizable population of Germans and other ethnic groups, officially labelled as ‘unreliable’, who had been exiled to Kazakhstan during the Second World War.

⁷In 1961 the average size of a sovkhoz in Kazakhstan was 107,100 ha, including pastures, grasslands, and arable land, with an average of 19,400 ha of arable land (Churin 1962). The average size of a kolkhoz in Kazakhstan was 37,000 ha, with an average of 10,600 ha of arable land (State Committee for Statistics of USSR 1988). Farms in the Kazakh SSR were on average two to three times larger than in other Soviet republics.

⁸The remaining 65 state-owned farms are experimental farms belonging to public agricultural research institutes, farms breeding and multiplying local livestock and crop varieties, and farms producing crop and livestock products for the government elite.

⁹ Table 1 shows that before the collapse of the USSR there were already some non-state agricultural enterprises and peasant farms in Kazakhstan, created in the wake of the perestroika reforms of 1985. The USSR had already constructed a basic legal platform for privatising state enterprises and had endorsed economic diversification (via a number of legal documents such as On private entrepreneurship, On state enterprises and their privatisation, On private farms, On cooperatives and On land reform).

¹⁰This peasant farm employs up to 70 workers, half of whom are employed permanently (thus including the off-season) partly to motivate them but also to maintain the farm infrastructure and the machinery and to prepare fields for the next cropping season. These hired workers are paid partly in cash but mainly in kind in the form of vegetables (carrots, red beet, cabbage, and potatoes) and processed farm outputs (flour, sunflower oil, and sugar). Sharakhimbaev and Bildebaeva (2002) describe a peasant farm in the southeast of Kazakhstan with 1400 ha of land, 47 oxen, 505 sheep and goats, 40 pigs, 27 horses, and 6 tractors.

¹¹Cooperatives pay land tax and income tax. The employees of a cooperative receive a monthly salary, with a 10 percent deduction going to their pension fund. They may also receive payment in kind at the end of the cropping season. Collective work and relations within the cooperative still largely resemble the structure of Soviet farms (cf. Sutherland 2008 for similar cases in Russia).

¹²Ironically, since 2005 the Kazakhstan Government has extolled the advantages of large-scale collective farming. It has been urging small-scale farmers to merge their properties into larger entities in order to respond better to market forces, to be more competitive, and to contribute more to national food security.

¹³Kazakhstan is among the world's top ten wheat exporters, the others being the USA, Australia, Canada, France, Argentina, Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, and India.

¹⁴A comparison of yields obtained by each farm type category is very difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. Existing statistics and the data used in several studies, mainly within the discipline of economics, do not, for example, differentiate between winter and summer wheat (with different yields) nor take into account the heterogeneity of environmental conditions and the enormous variation in input use within each farm category. Moreover, private agricultural producers may seriously underestimate yields in their returns to the District Statistics Office in order to avoid paying tax on the profits from farm output. We have refrained here from presenting such misleading aggregations.

¹⁵‘Mechanisator’ is a category of farm worker who operates, maintains, and repairs farm machinery.

¹⁶Nazpary (2002) provides a convincing account of how this moral discourse of economic and social security is interwoven with a popular critique of the new sexual relationships and new forms of prostitution emerging in the chaos of postsocialist Kazakhstan. According to this representation, world capitalism is a global brothel in which alien forces dishonour women's sexuality.

¹⁷This technological superiority of knowledge-intensive farming in Soviet times over current manual farming as expressed in nostalgia narratives has little equivalence in the industrial sector, where current technology is often much more advanced than in the Soviet era.

¹⁸Verdery (2005) identifies a major difference between capitalism and Soviet communism. The former is primarily concerned to make a profit by selling things; the latter with procurement. In this sense it was rational for farm managers to focus on procuring adequate supplies (which included elements of padding and hoarding) in order to facilitate production rather than on reducing costs. She argues that this maximisation of given capacity included maintaining a pool of labour (even though labour was often not employed ‘profitably’ in capitalist terms). It is probable that this accumulation of resources also included maintaining access to a pool of expert knowledge and skills.

¹⁹Whereas in Cuba ingenious mechanics keep old American cars from the capitalist past running in a communist economy, in Kazakhstan ingenious mechanics keep old tractors and machinery from the communist past running in a capitalist economy. One informant delivered services, such as ploughs, to farmers and proudly showed the authors various new machines he had invented and built using materials from the Soviet period.

²⁰Any item which could be used, as well as the wood and brick walls, were dismantled by hand and used as second-hand construction materials by local villagers or sold to city entrepreneurs.

²¹To our knowledge no inventory exists of the loss of farm infrastructure. These cases therefore provide only a preliminary indication of the magnitude of the problem and the size of the task of rebuilding the agricultural sector. A recent study on rural–urban migration identified the agrarian crisis as the main reason why people migrate: yet in the city these people are mostly belittled as second class citizens (Yessenova 2005; see also Nazpary 2002).

²²Almaty region covers 224,000 square km (eight percent of the total territory of Kazakhstan), with about 12 million ha of pastures and one million ha of arable land. As of 2006, there were 51,085 farm enterprises, 97 percent of which were peasant farms.

²³The population of Kazakhstan fell from 16,463,000 in 1998 (State Committee for Statistics of Kazakh SSR 1989) to 14,819,700 in 2002 (Agency for Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan 2002b). Over 40 percent are rural dwellers. This reduction of about 10 percent of the total population is a result of the mass emigration of ethnic Germans, Russians, and Ukrainians, among others.

²⁴Evers and Wall (2006) identify a similar process of knowledge loss in Uzbekistan following the post-Soviet transition, focusing their analysis at the local level.

²⁵The soil bonitet across the fields scores 10–12 out of a possible 100 points, making the soil close to unfertile. This measure of soil quality is based on a comparative assessment of several indicators: humus horizon thickness, the concentration of nutrients and elements, pH, chemical composition, and salinity. Land with a bonitet of less than 10 points is considered unfertile.

²⁶Kandiyoti (2003) makes a similar observation for Uzbekistan where 62 percent of new farmers were former members of the technical/administrative cadres of the former collective and 61 percent of new farmers had tertiary level schooling.

²⁷Shreeves' (2002) analysis of the importance of kinship relationships for successful farming suggests that kin networks may also play a role in knowledge flows.

²⁸This does not mean that all new farmers fail. Some are very keen to learn and seek out former Soviet agro-technicians for advice and literature, as well as participating in farmers' gatherings and learning from their own and others' mistakes. This difference is not fixed and there is some mobility. However, this supports rather than contradicts our argument that access to networks through which technical knowledge flows is a crucial element of survival in the transition period.

²⁹One interesting field of research is the role of agricultural skilling and deskilling in agricultural labour processes. For example, Stone (2007) argues that agricultural practice is much more dynamic than factory work. Rather than the mechanical application of knowledge or the making of binary decisions (adopt versus do not adopt), in agriculture the ability to make use of technology under variable conditions is much more important. In this sense, the agrarian crisis in Kazakhstan is partly a performance crisis.