{"id":4489,"date":"2020-03-30T18:43:18","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T16:43:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/?p=4489"},"modified":"2020-03-30T18:45:51","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T16:45:51","slug":"a-dacha-for-everyone-community-gardens-and-food-security-in-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.notechmagazine.com\/2020\/03\/a-dacha-for-everyone-community-gardens-and-food-security-in-russia.html","title":{"rendered":"A \u201cDacha\u201d for Everyone? Community Gardens and Food Security in Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Russia\u2019s large-scale peri-urban community agriculture has proven to be a very resilient food system. In this guest post, Arthur Grimonpont investigates the phenomenon and wonders if it could be reproduced in other industrial nations, for example in France.<\/p>\n

Image: Dacha settlement, Kursk Oblast, by Petr Magera (CC BY 2.0).<\/em><\/p>\n

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This article was written by Arthur Grimonpont, and originally appeared in Les Greniers d\u2019Abondance<\/a> under the title Les collectifs de jardins russes : une organisation r\u00e9siliente<\/a>. Translated from French by Beth Lindfield and Alice Essam, adapted by Kris De Decker.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Scale of the Concept<\/h2>\n

Satellite images demonstrate the undeniable importance of community gardening in some Russian cities. From the sky, you can see vast, continual mosaics of plots lined with trees, gathered together in pockets or strips on the outskirts of almost all city centres.<\/p>\n

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Typical community gardens seen from the sky on the western outskirts of Iaroslav, Russia.<\/em><\/p>\n

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In Irkoutsk, the most populated city in Siberia located next to Baikal Lake, community gardens have become immense neighbouring forests.<\/em><\/p>\n

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A neighbourhood in the south-west of Irkoutsk.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Russian Gardener’s Association estimates that of the one hundred million people in Russia, sixty million engage in gardening activites in order to produce food. [1] Even in the largest cities, such as Moscow or St Petersburg, over half of the population has an arable plot. These people are called gardener-inhabitants, or datchniki<\/em>. In provincial towns, such as Kazan, their number can reach as high as 80% of the population. [2] Throughout the country, there are an estimated 80,000 garden communities, which range from around ten to a few thousand plots. [4]<\/p>\n

Origins and Description of Community Gardens<\/h2>\n

Garden communities (similar to allotments in the UK) appeared in 1917, following the increasing and worsening food shortages after the Russian state established a monopoly on food production. The gardens, informal by origin, were originally disapproved by Soviet powers. However, they quickly became managed by the state due to their undeniable efficiency in counteracting the shortages. The communities were controlled by state businesses that divided the property into equal plots and distributed them to employees. [3]<\/p>\n

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A drawing of the guidelines of a plot. (Source: Revue Jardins aupres des Oussas’bas, Moscow, April 1959, p.13)<\/em><\/p>\n

The arrangement of the gardens was the objective of strict management. The law even enforced a certain number of apple, pear, cherry and plum trees, and raspberry and blackcurrant bushes, as well as defining a minimum area for strawberry plants and vegetable patches. The majority of plots have a surface area of 600m\u00b2 (a rectangle of 20 metres by 30) and are called the \u201csix-one hundred square metres\u201d in Russian. In general, they have a \u201cgarden house\u201d, or datcha<\/em>, which serves as a temporary living space, as well as for storing gardening tools and harvested fruits.<\/p>\n

It is evident that these Russian allotments offer few points of comparison with French allotments, which are much smaller (around 30 m\u00b2), don’t allow their occupants to stay there, and are historically reserved for poor people. [5]<\/p>\n

Local Footing<\/h2>\n

The immediate proximity of these gardens to where their occupants live establishes their reason for being. Developed during a time when using cars was rare or even non-existent and free time was rare and sought-after, the allotments were located close enough to town centres for people to get to on foot or by public transport (which was the almost exclusive mode of transport for city dwellers until the 80s).<\/p>\n

A ban on the commercialisation of harvested produce guarantees that it is only consumed locally. In the rural city of Kazan (1.2 million inhabitants), the majority of datchniki<\/em> that were asked said that, thanks to their gardens, they had managed to feed their families for at least the summer. With certain produce, such as potatoes, some even managed the whole year. Potatoes are some of the most cultivated vegetables, with farming statistics showing that nearly 80% of potatoes from the Kazan region are grown on these plots. [19,20]<\/p>\n

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Datcha and luxurious garden in Valdai, in the Oblast of Novgorod. Photo by Jonas Bendiksen<\/em><\/p>\n

As well as significantly contributing to agricultural production, the gardens play a major role in making people’s diets more varied in urban populations: they provide them with access to a diet rich in fresh produce that they can’t always find by conventional means due to their high cost. [10] They consistently harvest potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers, among many other crops. They also grow a lot of berries and fruit on trees. Many varieties are often cultivated for each type of plantation and annual flowers also often make an appearance. [11,12]<\/p>\n

The moderate size of the plots and the ban on the commercialisation of the produce separate them from the agro-industry (seeds, fertiliser, tools) and from professional selling avenues: swapping and using your own produce are the only legal practices. [13] The datchniki<\/em> don’t have to put up with fluctuations in the price of agricultural produce. Their harvest, little or not at all modified, doesn’t depend on any factories or mainstream infrastructure. The mixture of fruit trees, vegetable patch plants and ornamental crops creates a varied island of greenery. The gardens host great biodiversity, which decreases vulnerability to disease, pests and adverse weather conditions.<\/p>\n

Resilience and Flexibility<\/h2>\n

Throughout the 20th century, the number of collectives and the intensity of their cultivation fluctuated a lot in accordance with economic conditions. Likewise, today the gardens are distinguished by the extent of their productiveness, which partly conveys the differences in social status between their occupants. The continental climate of Russia encourages the majority of datchniki<\/em> to maintain a main place of residence and a job in urban areas, and to only temporarily occupy their gardens in the active season, stretching from May to September.<\/p>\n

In recent years, more and more Russians are making the choice to live in their \u201csix-one hundred square metres\u201d, which have been made more comfortable by some recent transformations. With the relative political and economic stability of Russia in recent years, the number of cultivated plots has decreased and the plots are progressively used more for holidays than for agriculture. Most families who can afford to tend to give up their food-producing cultures, although they often keep a small part for family tradition. [6]<\/p>\n

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From the beginning of the spring until the first frost, millions of Russians make the most of their summer chalets. Photo by PhotoXPress<\/em><\/p>\n

However, the system is flexible and its usefulness was made particularly clear during the disintegration of the Communist Bloc and the decline in production on kolkhozes<\/em> and sovkhozes<\/em> (state-owned Soviet farms in Russia) in the early 1990s. Russians were hit by the quick collapse of agro-industrial production and spending power (teachers saw their earnings cut by between 3 and 5 times). [14]<\/p>\n

During that period, fears concerning sudden provisions shortages and the outbreak of famine spurred the United States and the European Union to devise huge food aid programmes. However, the aid was not necessary due to the revival of allotments: people quickly converted the lawns in their \u201csix-one hundred square metres\u201d into space for food growing.<\/p>\n

A study from the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) showed that as many as 65% of families in the city of Moscow engaged in urban gardening in 1991 compared to 20% in 1970. In the mid-90s, this urban gardening provided the majority of potatoes, fruit and vegetables eaten by people living in cities. This production represented between 20 and 30% of the total value of food production in Russia. [15]<\/p>\n

A Model to Replicate?<\/h2>\n

In France, 57% of households have a house with 600m\u00b2 of adjoining land as their principal dwelling. [23,24] There already, then, exist significant potentially cultivatable plots of land. To provide all homes without a garden with a 600m\u00b2 plot on which to grow, around 18,000km\u00b2 (6950 miles squared) of arable land is needed near city centres, which is about 6% of used agricultural land in France. [26] This is the equivalent of half of the current urbanised land area. [25,27]<\/p>\n

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Dachas Moscow Oblast. Image by Trasprd (CC BY 4.0).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This might seem like a lot, but consider that:<\/p>\n