Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
has been polluted by pesticides and is low in soil nutrients. Around the delta areas
of the rivers, there has been an ecological change from a rich forest mixed with
fresh-water ponds, to a poor salt-resistant vegetation and wildlife. It can be
argued that the ecological disaster portrayed here is a further aspect of
dependency; in other words, it is because of the dependency on the centre that
wrong decisions were taken, neglecting ecological problems.
There are some comments that temper the dependency arguments made so far,
however. An important minority group in Central Asia seems to have benefited
from the cotton monoculture, and to have supported it. They were the owners
of land used for fruit and vegetables, and cattle farmers, often illegal, outside the
main cotton farms, who were able to produce at high prices for the local markets
(Dmitrieva 1996). For this group, and for others with extraordinarily productive
smallholdings, outside the
kolkhoz
system in central Asia, rural incomes were
quite high and the cotton monoculture did not represent the repression of an
impoverished peasantry. A further point is that the investments coming from
Russia did provide some improvement in the physical infrastructure and welfare
provision in the region, and without them, central Asia's economy might have
been more comparable to its poorer neighbours in the Muslim drylands reaching
from the Middle East to Pakistan.
Recent developments
In the years from 1985, there has been a progressive liberalization of the ex-
USSR. First, under Gorbachev, there was a gradualist approach, opening up
individual state enterprises to market rules and allowing some competition. This
work, at the microeconomic or firm level, was succeeded by a more rapid and
complete change from December 1991 when the USSR itself was dismantled,
being followed by the Community of Independent States (CIS), and leaving the
Baltic states outside the grouping.
Under Yeltsin from 1992, macroeconomic changes began, including the
dismantling of foreign exchange controls, and the institution of competitive
markets rather than a command economy. This period has also seen the
wholesale privatization of state enterprises, including some 14,000 enterprises
moved to private hands over 14 months, and decline of state spending from two-
thirds of total GNP to one-third by 1995. The cooperative and state farming
sector has also largely been privatized.
All these changes have left Russia as a relatively poor country, especially
because of the disruption of industries through changes in their organization and
economic environment. Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine had GNPs per capita
in 1994 of between $1500 and $3000, which places them not in the poorest
category of countries, but roughly on a par with the countries of South America.
This level sits uneasily with the earlier pretensions of world-power status on the
part of the Soviet Union.
