Gorbachev to Urge Boost in Food Output

Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev promises an all-out effort to increase food production under a program prepared for introduction today at a meeting of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.

The twice-postponed meeting is also expected to decide on a new policy for hiring and firing party cadres, which could give Gorbachev a freer hand to carry out his plans for reshaping Soviet society.

Also, the Central Committee is expected to dismiss Dinmukhamed A. Kunayev from the Politburo, the party’s supreme policy-making body. Kunayev, the party leader in Kazakhstan, has been accused of inefficiency and corrupt practices. He was named to the Politburo in 1971 while the late Leonid I. Brezhnev was the Soviet leader.

Gorbachev, speaking to party activists last Friday, was unsparing in his criticism of officials responsible for farm production.

“As to the food problem, comrades, we really must heave it off the ground,” Gorbachev said. “We have dawdled all too long.”

Spinning Its Wheels

In the years 1980-’85, he said, the farm economy was spinning its wheels. It started to stall, he said, as early as 1972, in the middle of Brezhnev’s 18 years as head of the party. Brezhnev died in November, 1982.

The Politburo, Gorbachev said, has decided on far-reaching changes to increase production of grain, meat, milk and eggs with the aid of new methods of farm management.

Yegor K. Ligachev, considered the No. 2 man behind Gorbachev, told the party group that there have been favorable recent trends in grain production, which rose to 210 million tons last year, as well as in the output of meat, milk and eggs.

But he zeroed in on the Ukraine for sharp criticism, indicating that Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky, a member of the Politburo and head of the party in the Ukraine, is in disfavor at the Kremlin.

A resolution adopted by the Central Committee, Ligachev said, asserts that Ukrainian party and government officials are moving “with intolerable slowness” to improve farm production.

From Producer to Consumer

“Matters went so far that the Ukraine, which was a supplier of grain to the state reserves, has turned into a grain consumer,” Ligachev said.

In another implied criticism of farm performance, an official weekly said the Soviet Union imported more than $11 billion in food in 1985 and that this expense soaked up all the country’s earnings from exports of natural gas.

An article in Argumenty i Fakty (Arguments and Facts) said that grain imports alone cost nearly $7 billion in that year. The publication recalled that in the years after World War II, the Soviet Union exported grain, meat, butter and other food products.

Meanwhile, an official Soviet weekly, giving an unprecedented insight into Kremlin power politics, provided indirect confirmation that Gorbachev’s election as Communist Party leader in 1985 met strong opposition, Reuters news service reported.

Without mentioning names, the magazine Ogonyok made clear that Gorbachev’s opponents tried to secure the election of Viktor V. Grishin, the party leader in Moscow, a close aide of Brezhnev and a man who was later disgraced.