By Amanda Lahan, Account Manager, The PBN Company, Washington, DC

The history of Russia’s application for World Trade Organization (WTO) membership was already long and complicated when, in June this year, Russia announced it would withdraw from WTO negotiations and focus on first forming a Customs Union with Belarus and Kazakhstan. However, after five weeks in which Russia sought to convince the international community that they had no intention of joining the WTO independently, the leadership seems to have reversed course again. In President Dmitry Medvedev’s words, joining the WTO as a Customs Union would be “nice, but rather problematic.”

So why the 180-degree turn so soon after the first reversal? It seems that U.S. and EU officials – intentionally or otherwise – called their bluff. The Russians stated that once the Customs Union was in place, expected to happen by January 1, 2010, they would immediately begin WTO negotiations to enter as a union. Previous WTO negotiation agreements would, they claimed, stand for the Customs Union as a whole. U.S. and EU officials, however, pointed out that joining the WTO as a Customs Union would not be nearly as easy as the Russians thought it would be. U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke stated that the joint bid would be “unworkable, unprecedented and would only delay matters.” Pascal Lamy, head of the WTO, suggested that the Customs Union may not have the “competence to negotiate these issues.”

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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.

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