KRASNODAR, Russia — So fertile is the black earth in Russia's southern breadbasket that farmers say if you plant a shovel, the handle will sprout leaves.
On the Shtukanev family farm, this makes for a lavish spread come dinner time: fresh chicken, potatoes, rice, bread, butter, spring dill, parsley and basil leaves, pickled tomatoes, eggplant, and, from the livestock, pure white \o7 sala\f7 , a thick hunk of salted pork fat that is considered a special delicacy here.
Every morsel--even the bottle of vodka brewed from local durham wheat--is grown by the familyon their 36-acre farm.
With a tractor, a harvester, few debts and higher yields than the collective farm he declared independence from two years ago, Vladimir G. Shtukanev, 34, is the very model of the entrepreneurial private farmer that Russian reformers envisioned.
But Shtukanev has one big problem: He has no buyer for the harvest bursting from his fields.
The Soviet state distribution system is moribund, and Russia has yet to replace it with a free market to transport, wholesale and retail food. Part of the problem is the endemic chaos that has plagued Russia's transition to a rational economic system, a situation further aggravated by runaway inflation. But equally to blame is the so-called Russian mafia, which has fixed food prices in the big cities and, with threats and violence, prevents farmers from selling their produce cheaper.
"Grave obstacles have appeared in getting food to the consumer," said Deputy Agriculture Minister Anatoly S. Kopylov in a recent interview. "One of the characteristics of this disorganized and chaotic market is its criminal nature."
The Agriculture Ministry is so concerned that it is setting up 800 regional wholesale food markets to link buyers and sellers in a "civilized" way, Kopylov said.
As Russia lurches toward a free-market economy, nowhere have the changes been more jolting--and more bewildering--than down on the farm, where the fields are bountiful but the marketing is a nightmare.
On paper, at least, the transformation from the Communist command system looks sweeping. Russia now has 277,000 privately owned farms that are home to 1.5 million people and span 29 million acres of land.
More than 90% of the vast and notoriously inefficient collective farms have been turned into joint-stock companies in which workers have ownership and voting rights. Here in Krasnodar, more than 15% of these new agro-businesses have already voted to fire the old Communist Party bosses who once carried out Moscow's commands, said Gennady G. Koltsev, the region's deputy administrator.
