Meat Travels Rocky Road to Market in Soviet Union

As the workers at Cold Storage Facility No. 15 of the State Trade Ministry slide back the heavy steel doors on the refrigerated rail cars lined up alongside their loading dock, they reveal to the light of day tangible evidence of just what is wrong with the Soviet Union’s food distribution system.

Flung about on the filthy floors of the freight cars lie hundreds of carcasses of fat-laced beef, left in piles that reach almost to the roof. No one bothered to store the meat properly during its journey from the Baltics.

Slowly, the workers climb on top of the mountain of beef, walking across the carcasses with their muddy boots, in order to pull down the meat from the top and fling it onto a wooden wagon. While they unload, most of the beef is left in the open air for an hour or more--unrefrigerated.

As the meat is carted into the storage facility, it is supposedly inspected for safety and quality. Yet as he stands watching the shipment get waved through the loading docks, Anatoly Antonov, the plant’s commercial director, concedes that the plant has never rejected meat “in all the years that I have worked here.”

Later, as the beef is hauled out for delivery to state meat shops in Moscow, it sits outside again, until the carcasses are thrown into small unrefrigerated trucks.

“It won’t be frozen in the state stores, so why should we refrigerate it in the trucks?” Antonov asked.

With the rapidly crumbling Soviet Union facing a growing threat of severe food shortages this winter, Western agricultural experts increasingly lay the blame on scenes like the one at Cold Storage Facility No. 15. While the country’s collectivized farms have trouble producing enough food for the table, analysts believe that the real problem stems from the Soviets’ chaotic and irrational food distribution system.

Western analysts believe that at least 30% of the Soviet harvest is lost, spoiled or stolen somewhere between the farm and the store shelf. In the case of meat, Soviet officials said recently that at least a quarter goes bad en route to the consumer--and as much as another quarter is written off as spoiled and taken by the butchers, truck drivers and store employees.

These are the primary reasons why there are food shortages in a nation with some of the richest agricultural land on Earth, and why the Soviets have turned to the United States and its Western allies for emergency food assistance to help the Soviet people get through the long winter.

The distribution system doesn’t work, analysts say, because no one has an economic incentive to care enough to make it work. So the wonder, American specialists say, is not that some food disappears--but that any arrives at all.

“The fundamental problem is that between the time it is produced and the time it is consumed, no one owns the food,” observed Richard Crowder, U.S. undersecretary of agriculture for international affairs. “No one has any interest in how it is handled, and whether it gets to the right place or not. So food spoils, food is stolen, it falls off trucks, it is hidden, all kinds of things happen to it.”

For more than 70 years, this nation’s Communist rulers made food production one of their highest priorities. They understood that a critical element in their social compact with the people was that you might not be free in the Soviet Union, but at least you wouldn’t be hungry.

Although the Communists poured money into farm machinery and other aspects of food production, they failed to live up to their promise to adequately feed the people, because they could never figure out how to make the distribution system work.

Their democratic heirs have not fared any better. This year’s grain harvest of 190 million tons, while below last year’s record, would still be enough to feed the people if properly distributed. But much of it is rotting in outdoor storage piles because the nation’s farmers, no longer fearful of central authority, are rebelling against artificially low state prices. As a result, state flour mills and bread bakeries are running at just half their capacity.

Yet instead of solving the problem by freeing grain prices, the state has reacted in typical Communist fashion: Some republics have passed new laws making grain spoilage due to improper storage a crime.

Still another problem for the new democrats in Moscow and the republics is that they have inherited a distribution system that was designed not for the efficient delivery of food but for political effect. For example, the Communists built enormous urban warehouses where at least a year’s supply of food--including highly perishable vegetables and other produce--could be stored. That was supposed to prevent farmers from starving the cities and gaining political leverage over the Communist Party. Instead, the practice ensures that much of the food will spoil.

So, caught between a centrally controlled economy and a free-market economy, the entire distribution system is like a subway car stalled between stations. And it is likely to stay there until the new central and regional governments agree to finally free up prices as well as the rest of their economy.

“I don’t think they understand even today what is wrong with their distribution system,” said one U.S. agriculture official who asked not to be named. “When you talk to them, they say that if only they had more trucks or computers, everything would be OK. They think this is an infrastructure problem. They don’t understand that the problem is that they don’t have a free market with free ownership and market-clearing prices. Until they have that, the system will break down at every point along the way.”

The meat distribution chain offers a painfully clear example of how the system is degenerating from apathy.

The Trade Ministry’s Cold Storage Facility No. 15--which can handle up to 22,000 tons of meat for processing, cutting and shipment--is supposed to supply sausages and meat products to state-run retail meat shops in four regions of Moscow. Direct deliveries to retail shops are supposed to provide fresh meat on store shelves each day.

But there is an enormous gulf between the way the facility is supposed to operate and the way things really work.

This year, livestock producers throughout the Soviet Union have been holding back their cattle and hogs from the state system to take advantage of higher prices on the underground market. They are refusing to ship enough beef and pork to keep the storage facility running at full capacity. Now the plant must import, mostly from Eastern Europe, as much as 40% of the beef that it processes.

In addition, its mechanized cutting operation, designed to supply prepared meats for restaurants and other institutional food outlets, has been completely idle. Restaurants have largely dropped out of the state food distribution system and now pay more for higher quality foods in private markets.

Yet shortages and competition from private markets have failed to bring greater efficiency at the cold storage plant. In a city facing chronic shortages of meat and dairy products, beef regularly sits inside the storage facility for three months or more before it is shipped two or three miles to local state stores in tiny trucks owned by a separate state organization, the Ministry of Transport. While it waits to be loaded, the meat often spoils, and it gets worse when it is piled into the unrefrigerated trucks. (Soviet officials say that not a single refrigerated meat truck is manufactured in the entire country.)

“When you load meat into uncooled trucks, the temperature is not appropriate. It is very bad, especially in the summer,” said Yevgeny Nagonov, a dock worker at Cold Storage Facility No. 15.

In the state shops--which in Moscow are run by yet another agency, the Moscow Regional Food Committee--the meat is supposed to be sold the day it is shipped from cold storage, since the retail stores have no refrigeration either.

But often deliveries are late, and the meat doesn’t arrive until just before the shops close for the night. Then it sits in “cooling rooms,” to be kept slightly chilled but not fully refrigerated, until it is put on display the next day.

State Meat Store No. 22 on the outskirts of Moscow is supposed to receive all of its meat through regular deliveries from Cold Storage Facility No. 15. But manager Tatyana Polyakova complains that much of the meat disappears along the way.

“So many trucks with meat just don’t turn out,” said Polyakova. “And many come and they don’t have as much meat as they are supposed to. Then the drivers argue that the shipment was weighed wrong at the storage facility.”

When deliveries are short or when she has other complaints about the meat she is given, Polyakova must wade into the Soviet bureaucratic quagmire. She has to contact officials at the Regional Food Committee, who then contact the Moscow Trade Assn., which is supposed to deal with the Ministry of Trade, which in turn deals with its own managers at the cold storage operation.

Some of the spoiled meat does make its way to the meat counter and is purchased by people who, in desperation, hope they can cut out the bad parts. Some goes to institutional buyers, such as sausage factories and the state airline Aeroflot, which use what they can.

With his bare hands, the butcher at State Meat Store No. 22 throws whole carcasses onto a huge old tree stump in a back room and begins to whack away at them with an ax. When he is finished, he grabs a handful of the rough cuts of beef and takes them out to the front room for sale--where they are quickly snapped up by shoppers often lined up into the street.

“It is all very unsanitary, I admit,” said Polyakova. “Often, our loading dock workers are drunk, and so are the workers who clean up the shops.” She added: “Of course, I would do things differently if I owned the shop.”

Times staff writer James Risen was recently on assignment in the Soviet Union.