Agriculture: The Failure of State Capitalism and the Crisis of Agricultural Science

Continuing on agriculture

It is impossible to describe all of agriculture's problems; one could write on and on.

In my previous post, I mentioned two important problems that need to be solved: funding and making it simpler, and regulating the sales market in order to smooth out sharp price swings.

In this post, I would like to continue with the basic problems of agriculture that need to be addressed.

3. The state agricultural sector. Like all state policy in the post-crisis period after 2009, it was built on state capitalism. Instead of funding the private agricultural sector, the state decided to develop agriculture itself. A decision was made to finance new enterprises through the Food Contract Corporation. Many projects were funded: grain terminals, cotton production, tomato paste production, orchards, vegetable storage facilities, onion production, and so on. The construction of a pumping station and an entire water supply system was financed separately. The result: of all these investments, only the grain terminals are working, while the other enterprises are barely alive. I cannot go into every detail, as it would be unethical, but it is a fact that the state cannot manage enterprises that require daily oversight.

Had all this money gone to financing the private sector, the picture would be entirely different. Today these overvalued assets are practically impossible to sell, except in installments over a long period or at a steep discount. Fortunately, the new management now seems to be moving actively and trying to do something.

But the state needs to exit business and stop deluding itself about the efficiency of state capitalism.

Given the existing program for privatizing the state sector, I very much hope that the state will not try to spread out its losses, but will quickly and efficiently transfer these assets to private hands. Even if it means taking losses, it will still be more efficient, because every day state enterprises lose money through poor management.

4. Education and science. Unfortunately, our agricultural science is, to put it mildly, in deep decline, and since the time of Baraev nothing new or of high quality has been produced. I would call a significant part of this science pseudoscience. As it happens, my father worked in science all his life and spent 22 years at experimental stations in the Tyumen Region. Later I helped with the technical preparation of his dissertations: I built charts and calculated correlations. I also had a chance to talk with his colleagues, who were likewise writing dissertations. I was struck by the fact that many candidate's and doctoral dissertations were written simply on invented data (people just took data and fitted it to the desired result), or took old Soviet data, changed the years and presented it as their own results. All of this passed. Nobody checks the reliability of the data. For example, how can one defend a dissertation without spending a single day in the field? As a result, not only does science itself suffer, but so does production, which has no faith in such science. In practice, few people use any of these pseudo-developments. I remember how my father and mother spent days on end in the fields, filling out field logs, writing reports and so on.

The creation of a mega-company called KazAgroInnovation solved nothing and, as a result, it was simply shut down. It is yet another failed project. Science cannot be commercial, and the absence of a result in science is also a result. Perhaps I am wrong, but without developing agricultural science we will remain dependent on foreign technology for the rest of our lives. Fertilizers are foreign, seeds are foreign, pesticides are foreign, machinery is foreign, drip irrigation is foreign, greenhouses are foreign, and the technologies are foreign too.

Unfortunately, in our country any practicing agronomist knows more than any doctor of agricultural sciences.

That is why agricultural science and education require a complete overhaul. This is not a quick undertaking; by now it will take a long time.

Unfortunately, in Kazakhstan education is acquired not at universities and colleges but on the job, in the old, tried-and-true way: from grandfather to father, from father to son. In other words, mentoring methods are used, and a university degree is just a piece of paper that gets you in the door as an apprentice. But because of this there is no progress: in the old way, only the old is passed down, and nothing new.

To be continued