Profit-Conscious Farmers Fuel Soviet Bread Shortage

Soviet farmers seeking profits on the open market are causing chronic bread shortages in the cities by holding back millions of tons in grain sales to the state, newspapers reported today.

Media reports said farmers in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan--two of the country’s major breadbaskets--have failed to meet state contracts for 6.4 million tons of grain.

They find it more profitable to pay fines for non-delivery and sell their produce at higher prices in richer parts of the Soviet Union, the reports said.

“Having received economic independence, farmers are throwing themselves headlong into commerce,” the newspaper Rabochaya Tribuna said in a bitterly worded report on its front page.

The activity of profit-minded farmers was only the latest of several explanations offered for the bread shortage that has been particularly acute in Moscow.

Bad distribution and a lack of workers have also been blamed for the shortages.

Panic buying and hoarding have emptied shelves of bakeries and bread stores in Moscow and surrounding regions. Mayor Gavriil Popov has suggested that military conscripts should be drafted to help bake bread.

Soviet television said President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has cabled republic and regional leaders instructing them to make sure their farmers honored their grain contracts to the state.

Gorbachev told local leaders that they would be held responsible for getting the job done.

Rabochaya Tribuna said farmers had been dazzled by the prospect of profits, held out by the first of a series of reforms designed to modernize the slumping Soviet economy.

The newspaper said many farmers were hoarding grain for sales to the highest bidders, with cooperatives in the rich Baltic republics paying five times the state price.

Others were setting it aside for use as fodder.