The Limited Power of U.S. Philanthropy : Food credits to U.S.S.R., yes; but Moscow must help itself

There is a specter haunting the Soviet Union these days, the specter of widespread hunger and even localized famine.

Newspapers are filled with stories of shrinking food availability, especially in industrial cities where the central government no longer guarantees basic supplies. The latest horror story says livestock production has fallen by as much as 17%. Trud , the trade union paper, shows one reason why. The state-fixed price for chicken has risen 80%, but at the same time farmers are being charged 300% to 500% more for feed and fertilizer. Forced to sell below cost, farmers have naturally cut output. As with chicken, so with milk, meat and other products whose real costs of production have nothing to do with their dictated prices. The government-run command economy is collapsing, but the diffidently approached market economy has not filled the void.

In Washington this week Eduard A. Shevardnadze personally appealed to President Bush to approve $1.5 billion in new food credits to the Soviet Union. Shevardnadze is well-regarded by the Administration. As foreign minister, a post he resigned last December to protest his government’s drift to the right, Shevardnadze labored hard to help end the Cold War. Bush has been disinclined to approve the new agricultural credits. The fact remains that millions of Soviet citizens face hunger and worse, through no fault of their own. The humanitarian dimensions of the aid request, and not just its political implications, must be weighed.

The United States has already guaranteed Moscow $1 billion in agricultural credits. That has helped fill part of the food gap, but it has done nothing to give the Soviets a true market system, or built the infrastructure needed to harvest, transport, store and distribute food efficiently. Investment in these areas has never been adequate. Even when harvests are good, systemic failures keep vast amounts of food from reaching consumers.

The reallocation of scarce resources to the agricultural and consumer goods sectors has become a matter of desperate need. Yet, even after six years of perestroika , the old priorities continue to dominate. In its latest issue Time reports that new U.S. intelligence estimates put Soviet defense spending at a whopping 30% of the gross national product, not the 15% or 20% that had long been assumed. In a recent meeting with former President Richard Nixon, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov indicated the figure could in fact be closer to 40%. This year, end of the Cold War or not, the Soviet defense budget increased 37%.

These unproductive outlays are both intolerable and clearly unsustainable in an economy already well into decline. Changes must come, however powerful the constituency for large defense budgets. For now, though, those outlays continue, even as President Mikhail Gorbachev calls on the United States and other Western nations not to abandon their material and political support for his reform efforts.

Supporting reform efforts is clearly a high Western priority, for the probable alternative to their success, as Gorbachev warns, could well be chaos and the triumph of reactionary forces. But support within limits; the West can’t make the Soviet system its economic ward, nor should it try. What it can do is tie its help, agricultural credits or whatever, to clear proof that Soviet economic priorities are being reordered. What it can do is point to the madness that sees more than 5,000 Soviet military enterprises continuing to crank out unneeded Mig 29s and other hardware, when nearly 300 million Soviet citizens lack life’s necessities.

Gorbachev’s warning is misdirected. It continues to be the Soviet system that is propelling the country toward chaos, not Western indifference.