Abstract
Asian (Eastern) Russia is a globally important agricultural region but has received little attention in the literature. This book chapter evaluates the history of agricultural development in Asian Russia, often colloquially called Siberia, which is a vast region that stretches from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. First, we summarize agro-environmental conditions across the region. Second, we present the dynamics of land use, crop and milk yields from medieval times until recent years and discuss the major underlying causes that bring about the observed changes in the extent and intensity of agricultural production. We then briefly discuss untapped agricultural potentials in the region regarding expanding cultivated areas and particularly regarding increasing productivity in crop and livestock production. We particularly focus attention on socio-economic and environmental impediments that limit uncovering such production potentials in the region.
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Notes
- 1.
This vast region, hereafter labelled Asian Russia, is also often called colloquially Eastern, Asiatic Russia or Siberia.
- 2.
Far East consists of the Amur, Kamchatka, Khabarovsk, Magadan, Primorje and Sakhalin provinces, plus the Jewish and Chukotka autonomous regions—Fig. 6.1.
- 3.
We should note that our numbers for the period 1917–1920 differ from the reports of other scholars, who indicated more drastic decreases in sown areas and livestock numbers for the Civil War period (Dronin and Bellinger 2005; Okladnikov 1968c). We used official statistics on agricultural developments from various sources. The official statistics between 1917 and 1940 are questionable because of potential manipulation by the government. We cannot avoid such bias, as we wanted to use systematically collected data. All other official statistics, e.g., after 1953, are considered to better reflect agricultural dynamics.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge funding made available through the BMBF KULUNDA project and ERA.Net Russia Plus Project N.559. The work is performed according to the Russian Government Program of Competitive Growth of Kazan Federal University. We also acknowledge funds from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, grant N. 18-45-030039.
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Prishchepov, A.V., Schierhorn, F., Dronin, N., Ponkina, E.V., Müller, D. (2020). 800 Years of Agricultural Land-use Change in Asian (Eastern) Russia. In: Frühauf, M., Guggenberger, G., Meinel, T., Theesfeld, I., Lentz, S. (eds) KULUNDA: Climate Smart Agriculture. Innovations in Landscape Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15927-6_6
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