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Soviet Union [USSR] Technical Crops
So-called technical crops are widely and successfully
cultivated in the Soviet Union. Among such crops are cotton, sugar
beets, sunflowers and other crops producing oilseeds, flax, and
hemp. In 1986 these crops were grown on 13.7 million hectares,
about 6.5 percent of the total sown area. In the 1970s, the Soviet
Union assumed the position of the world's largest producer of
cotton, averaging more than 8 million tons of raw cotton per year.
Virtually all of the country's cotton was grown on irrigated lands
in Central Asia and the Azerbaydzhan Republic; the Uzbek Republic
alone accounted for 62 percent of total output between 1981 and
1985.
The Soviet Union has been very successful at cultivating
sunflowers, accounting for over half of world output. The crop
flourishes in the low-precipitation southern zones, especially in
the Donets-Dnepr and northern Caucasus regions. The area allotted
to sunflower cultivation steadily decreased from a peak level of
4.8 million hectares in 1970 to 3.9 million hectares in 1987. Total
output also dropped, but thanks to improved seed stock and more
effective use of intensive technology, the decrease in production
was not proportionate to the reduced area for cultivation. The
average annual harvest between 1971 and 1975 was slightly below 6
million tons, and in 1987 it amounted to 6.1 million tons.
Since the early 1970s, sugar beets have occupied roughly the
same amount of farmland as the other major technical crops--cotton
and sunflowers--averaging some 3.5 million hectares. Sugar beet
production, concentrated in the central and western Ukrainian
Republic, the northwestern Caucasus, and the eastern areas of the
Kazakh Republic and other Soviet Central Asian republics averaged
88.7 million tons per year between 1976 and 1980, well above the
previous high of an average of 81.1 million tons per year in the
1966-70 period. Between 1981 and 1985, output fell to 76.3 million
tons annually but rose thereafter, reaching 90 million tons in
1987. Although in the 1980s sugar beets continued to provide over
60 percent of the country's sugar production, the Soviet Union was
becoming increasingly dependent on raw sugar imported primarily
from Cuba, e.g., from 2.1 million tons per year between 1966 and
1970 to 4.9 million tons per year between 1981 and 1985.
Grown for fiber and as a source of linseed oil, flax has been
particularly successful in the mixed-forest zone northwest of
Moscow and in the Belorussian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and
northwest Ukrainian republics. Although the area sown to flax
steadily decreased from 2.1 million hectares in 1940 to only
980,000 hectares in 1986, production actually rose from 349,000
tons of fiber in 1940 to a peak of 480,000 tons in 1965 and to
366,000 tons in 1986.
Hemp, the other significant fiber crop, has been grown since
the eighteenth century, although its area of cultivation has
steadily decreased from about 600,000 hectares in 1940 to fewer
than 100,000 hectares in 1986. Used in making rope, string, and
rough cloth, hemp is grown primarily in the central chernozem area
south of Tula and in the northern Caucasus.
Data as of May 1989
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