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Author(s)

Alexander V. Prishchepov, Martin Petrick, Daniel Müller, Florian Schierhorn,Roland Kraemer, Irina Kurganova, Michael Kopsidis

Title

Sixty years of the Virgin Lands Campaign in Russia and Kazakhstan An assessment from an economic  ecological and political perspective

Description

Alexander V. Prishchepov, Martin Petrick, Daniel Müller, Florian Schierhorn, Roland Kraemer, Irina Kurganova, Michael Kopsidis (2015) "Sixty years of the Virgin Lands Campaign in Russia and Kazakhstan: An assessment from an economic, ecological and political perspective", 2015 IAMO Yearbook, Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO), Halle Saale, Germany, pp. 39-55

https://www.iamo.de/fileadmin/user_upload/Bilder_und_Dokumente/05-publikationen/Annuals/iamo2015_en.pdf

Abstract

As the world’s population quadrupled in the 20th century from 1.5 to 6 billion, so the area of agricultural land increased substantially (Ramankutty et al., 2002; Ramankutty and Foley, 1998). The expansion of agricultural production and land use poses a great threat to biodiversity and results in the loss of uncultivated natural habitats. These land-use processes consist not only of gradual, reversible changes, but also critical turning points (Radeloff et al., 2013) at which fundamental decisions are made about the expansion or decommissioning of agricultural land. Although we know that such turning points – often irreversible – exist in land use, we cannot reliably predict when they will occur in the future (Müller et al., 2014). What we can do, however, is analyze fundamental decisions relating to land use from the past and draw lessons from these. One such critical turning point was the so-called Virgin Lands Campaign (VLC) in the former Soviet Union (FSU) when between 1954 and 1964, more than 43 million hectares of predominantly untouched grassland in the Eurasian Steppe of Russia and Kazakhstan were turned over to cultivation. The goal was to increase wheat production to meet the pressing Soviet need for cereals after the Second World War (Durgin, 1962; McCauley, 1976). As an alternative to this rapid expansion of farmland, so-called "broadening the cultivation", opponents of the VLC, which originated with Khrushchev, proposed a strategy of "deepening the cultivation". This envisaged a relatively small expansion of arable land, focusing instead on increasing wheat yields on existing farmland (Durgin, 1962). Sixty years after the start of this most rapid large-scale land-use expansion, we can now analyze the effects of the land reclamation program on agricultural production, as well as ecological and sociopolitical development in the study area and this is done in the paper.

The paper attached below.