1988 Grain Harvest Worst in 3 Years, Soviets Report

MOSCOW —  With food already in short supply, the Soviet government had more bad news for consumers Monday: The 1988 grain harvest was the worst in three years.

Stepan A. Sitaryan, first deputy chairman of the State Planning Committee, told a news conference that the preliminary figure for the 1988 harvest was 195 million metric tons.

“It was better than before, but not as good as 1986 and 1987,” Sitaryan said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture had forecast a harvest of 205 million tons, and Western experts said the figure reported Monday was significantly below what the Soviets had expected.

The grain harvest for 1987 was 211.3 million tons, and in 1986 it was 210.1 million tons. The target for 1988 set out in the five-year plan was 235 million tons.

Sitaryan gave no explanation for the failure to meet the target. Trying to put the best face on the situation, he said that the average grain production per year for the 1986-88 period was 205 million tons.

In the period covered by the previous five-year plan, the annual average production was 180 million tons, so recent years have reflected an overall increase.

But Soviet shoppers contemplating empty supermarket shelves have little sense of statistical improvement. They complain that the availability of basic foodstuffs in government shops is worse now than it was in the early 1970s under Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Last month, a Soviet newspaper reported that meat was being rationed in about a third of the Russian Federation, the largest of the 15 Soviet republics and an area that has some of the richest farmland in the Soviet Union.

The shortage of food has caused not only grumbling but also serious embarrassment for Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and his campaign of perestroika , or economic reform.

Not only is the working class not seeing the promised benefits in the third year of perestroika ; the economic situation actually seems worse, and this is likely to stiffen opposition to future reforms.

Last week, Gorbachev said that the Communist Party Central Committee will meet in March to deal with agricultural problems.

“It will deal first of all,” he said, “with food supply, one of the most important problems we need to solve under the conditions of perestroika , because, to speak plainly, it has become bogged down.”

Gorbachev urged planners to make better use of the land and to correct mistakes that have led to food shortages.

“We made many mistakes,” he said. “We raped nature and the land.”

Foreign agriculture experts said the disappointing grain harvest may have figured prominently last month in the Kremlin’s decision to reach a new agreement on buying wheat from the United States.

Under the agreement, the Soviets will be allowed to buy at least 9 million tons of U.S. grain each year for the next two years. In the 1970s, large Soviet purchases of American grain disrupted the wheat market in the United States, prompting the U.S. government to require the Soviets to plan minimum purchases long in advance.

A shortage of grain can be widely felt in the Soviet Union. Bread is a staple food, and meat and milk production depends to a large extent on the availability of grain for use as cattle feed.

At Monday’s press conference, Deputy Chairman Sitaryan made it clear that Soviet citizens are also unhappy about other aspects of Gorbachev’s reform program.

For one thing, the government has indicated that amid the shortages of consumer goods, prices will be going up. Price reform, Sitaryan said, is essential to rebuild the economy.

He said popular attitudes toward higher prices are “very negative” and will undoubtedly slow the pace of change, and he added, “We cannot ignore these attitudes.”

Significant Grumbling

There is also significant grumbling about the spread of small private and cooperative businesses, which are intended to bring an element of responsiveness to a marketplace long dominated by state-run enterprises.

Too often, Sitaryan said, the cooperative enterprises buy supplies on the retail market, thus exacerbating retail shortages. They can pay retail prices for some supplies because they tend to search out products in which shortages--and therefore the freedom to set their own prices very high--are the greatest.

Times staff writer Dan Fisher also contributed to this article.