Sharashkin, Leonid. The socioeconomic and cultural significance of

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Food gardening
Steel
Electric power
Chemilcal & drugs
Forestry, wood, pulp&paper
Building materials
Oil refining
Natural gas
Textile
Coal
Figure 1. Food gardening and other industries’ contribution to GDP in 2004, billions of
rubles. Source: Rosstat 2006.
The share of food gardening in national agriculture has increased from 32% in 1992 to
over 50% by 2000. Figure 2 presents the place of household production in the country’s
agriculture. For the past decade, food gardeners have been making a larger contribution to
the total agricultural output of the country than the commercial sector. According to Rutkevich
(2001), this is still an underestimate, since these figures do not include harvesting
wild-growing plants, berries, nuts and mushrooms, and fishing and hunting, which also
make an important contribution to the national food economy.
It should be noted that since the above aggregate statistics include the production of
grain by the industrial agriculture sector, as well as production of industrial non-food crops
such as flax, the contribution of the households to the food economy is even greater. The
share of households in production of certain products is very high: it is consistently over
90% for potatoes and around 80% for vegetables (see Table 1).
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