How About Planting Potatoes This Weekend?

By Anna Yarmarkova, Associate Account Manager, The PBN Company, Moscow

As the crisis continues, Russians have started looking at ways of cutting their expenditures.  And with salaries falling and food prices rising, people are increasingly planting vegetables instead of buying them.

Dachas, or Russian country houses, have long been popular among city-dwellers.  The high season starts with the May holidays - generally kicking off with shashliki, Russian kebabs, and a good spring clean.  The summer dacha phenomenon, and the corresponding mass exodus from the country’s cities, is so popular that politicians have even been known to save unpopular decisions for this period when citizens are more focused on planting gardens than reading newspapers.

Dachas were originally encouraged during Soviet times as a way for people to help the state by feeding themselves by planting vegetables like potatoes.  With the fall of the Soviet Union and the corresponding improvement in quality of life, people from big cities started to treat their dachas primarily as places for relaxation rather than as sources of food - those with a hankering for gardening tended to prefer petunias to potatoes.

But as Russians cut holidays abroad and grocery bills, dachas are enjoying a resurgence as a place for spending summer vacations - and planting potatoes.

Both business and government have caught on to the trend.  People can now sign up for newly-created recreational courses on basic farming and gardening.  And regional authorities have created opportunities for backyard farmers to sell their produce at local markets.

So is the resurgence of the dacha a symptom of a wider trend for Russia to revert to a more agriculturally-based economy?

Well it is certainly arguable that, in the days of high oil prices, opportunities were missed to refurbish tired factories.  Now there is no money for this sort of investment in industrial infrastructure, but there doesn’t appear to be much funding - or political impetus - for large-scale agricultural regeneration either.  So although federal and regional authorities - and the media they control - may be playing to Russians’ innate love of the soil as the summer commences, they are not likely to promote potato farming at the expense of the vitally-needed progress in more twenty-first century aspects of Russian life.

Thus, for now the dacha phenomenon does not yet seem to be part of a sweeping reversal in Russian macroeconomic trends.  But on a microeconomic level, with the crisis undoubtedly taking Russians back to old habits of economy, this year’s dacha season is certainly poised to be as much about the beetroot as the banya.

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