Drought and new crop failure. Why the authorities do not protect Stalin's legacy - forest belts

Elena Petrova, Tatyana Sviridova

The drought in the south of the country has destroyed not only 25 to 40% of the wheat harvest, but also sunflowers. In the southern regions, every third ton of seeds is harvested. This year, due to weather conditions, the yield in the Rostov Region and Krasnodar Krai has decreased by 35%, and in some areas - up to 50%. In the Rostov Region, a drought emergency has already been declared in 27 of 43 districts.

In the Volgograd and Astrakhan regions, fertile black soil is giving way to sands from Kazakhstan and Kalmykia. Over ten years, from 2010 to 2020, the Volgograd, Astrakhan, Rostov regions, Kalmykia and Dagestan lost 5.5 thousand square kilometers. Fertile soils turned into desert and semi-desert.

"The rise in temperature has accelerated in the last 50 years, the decrease in precipitation has become more visible. Therefore, the desertification process has accelerated," says Alexander Shuvalov, head of the Meteo forecasting center.

According to Vladimir Zakrutkin , professor of the Department of Geoecology and Applied Geochemistry at the Institute of Earth Sciences at SFedU, the lack of moisture in the soil has increased, which inevitably leads to droughts. There have been 15 of them over the past 30 years. The average annual precipitation in the Rostov Region has decreased almost twofold. Dry winds have been added to the dryness - eastern and south-eastern winds without a gram of moisture now blow for 100 days, from April to October.

According to scientists and ecologists, all these phenomena are just the beginning.

There are only two ecosystems that can protect against the desert. These are forests and swamps.

Ecologist Alexey Yaroshenko gives a clear example:

— The forest belt protects the fields around which it is located. It works at a short distance. The forest belts are narrow, but that is not important. An area of ​​one hectare protects 20 hectares of surrounding land.

But the real situation shows that plantings are decreasing. The UFO expedition conducted a survey of the southeast of the Rostov region. It turned out that a quarter of the forest belts laid out in the 1950s under Stalin disappeared from 1979 to 2020. There are only three reasons: landscape fires, aging trees and logging.

— There are a lot of fires, they often go into forest belts and lead to the death of trees. All sorts of landscape fires. Sometimes even what farmers do themselves — they burn dry grass. Formally, this is prohibited. They fine you for dry grass, the last two or three years have been quite fined. It is more profitable to burn it when no one sees. This is the main factor, — says ecologist Yaroshenko.

Another reason is more objective. To make the forest appear faster, they planted fast-growing species - poplar and birch. But these are also the most short-lived trees, which do not live long, and in the southern conditions they fall apart and die even faster.

Deforestation is only the third cause of forest belt destruction. Forest belts have been, are being, and will be cut down, despite all the punishments.

— If the damage is more than 5 thousand rubles, it is a criminal case. And it theoretically applies to any forests and plantations, including those on agricultural lands. Therefore, if someone cuts down forest belts without documents, if there is someone to detect all this, then formally this falls under Article 260 of the Criminal Code, which provides for up to seven years of imprisonment and a fine of up to 3 million rubles. Another thing is that no one really cares about this. If no one sees, then it remains so.

Until 2006, forest belts were mainly under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture. It was a large enterprise, which the authorities did not have time for and there were no specialists.

— They can belong to both the military department and the enterprise. There is no special department that would deal only with trees. And this is the biggest problem we have everywhere. Not only forest belts, but also any forest plantations belong to different departments, instead of only the forest department dealing with this. If it is a tree plant, then, according to the Forest Code, they must immediately give some kind of product. That is why they began to transfer them to municipalities, — Irina Cherkashina, director of the Rostov public organization EcoPravo, told Novye Izvestia .

So when the opportunity arose and the new Forest Code was adopted, the ministry was relieved to push the unprofitable item onto the municipalities. By 1953, 2.3 million hectares of forests had been planted. Municipalities suddenly found themselves in possession of assets they had no idea about. No specialists, no money, no understanding of what to do and how to do it. Some local authorities tried to shift the problem onto farmers, but they shun the forest belts like the devil shuns incense.

The Ministry of Agriculture doesn’t even want to hear about the second part of Professor Dokuchaev’s plan to plant forests on unused land.

— We have quite a lot of barren land. They need to be occupied by forests. This is very important for combating desiccation. On the scale of entire regions, this will make a great contribution to combating climate aridity. In a rough approximation, we can calculate it this way: increasing forest cover by 1% increases the yield of one centner per hectare of grain, all other things being equal. On a national scale, this has a colossal impact on agriculture, — says Alexey Yaroshenko.

The officials' argument is this: we will return abandoned lands to agricultural use and thereby increase harvests. Environmentalists say that the authorities want to return to an extensive model of crop production - lower yields, but more land and, ultimately, a larger harvest.

— I think there are simply no people there who know this problem well. That is why they count hectares, rubles and centners. We will plow more, and magically we will have more grain. I think that is the reasoning now. But it does not work, — the expert warns.

This also works poorly because if there is soil degradation, no one wants such land. This is what is happening in reality. As Andrey Sizov from SovEcon explained, the cost of agricultural land in the south of Russia is falling, and investors prefer to invest in less fertile, but not erosion-prone fields in Central Russia.

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