from the Far East, with none from the Ural. If the situation is going on unbridled,
nearly all the Eastern Russia will turn into a very huge region in depression.
Since the indicators of agricultural development in this research are rather
complementary in importance, it is not only the regions’ ranks and their behavior
that become a subject of interest - the feasibility of regions’ self-sufficiency in
staple agricultural produce has become a metter of principle.
The 1990-1994 findings are indicative of the fact that decline in the volume of
agricultural produce involved all the regions. There was one exeption in the
produce concerned - the potatoes - of which the yield displayed a rise in many a
region. Food ration might well be said to have sadly changed, offering potatoes
rather than meet. Most regions have been demonstrating the dramatically
progressive problem of a drop in food indicators. For instance, per capita meat
production has shown a 1.8% fall in Khabarovsk and Primorskiy Krays, Amur and
Magadan Oblasts, Chukotka and Taymyrskiy Autonomous Okrugs. Similar problem
with milk is affecting virtually all those regions, as well as Murmansk and Sakhalin
Oblasts, Koryak AO. And there is a growing dependence on the part of northern and
Far-Eastern areas of Russia upon the food-stuffs’ delivery from the «mainland», or
upon the imports of the same. First and foremost, food shortages would make a
very serious impact on the population of so-called «unsuccessful» regions.
4.2. Identification of backward, depressed and successful regions
No formally accepted list of problem regions has been made available so far, let
alone their typification. A variety of proposals are put forward instead. If economic
ones were assumed as fundamental to provide for the regional typification, all the
subjects of RF, in our comprehension, could be categorized into the types of
regions as follows:
1) traditionally backward
2) depressive
a) pre-reform
b) newly created
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