Documents / FOIA release
This Joint Committee Print, dated December 8, 1982, gathers studies that the Central Intelligence Agency's Directorate of Intelligence prepared for the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress. It gives estimates of Soviet gross national product for 1950 to 1980, with indexes of industrial production, agricultural production and consumption, and explains the methods and data behind them. The foreword says official Soviet statistics inflate growth and that the CIA measures offer a more accurate picture. The document contains no UFO material.
“Gross”60+ pages
Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421 Estimated quantities of grain and potatoes used for feed are lagged to be consistent with crop year data. The harvest of a given year is assumed to provide one- third of the feed used in that calendar year plus two- thirds of feed used in the subsequent calendar year. Although this assumption becomes less plausible in years of sharp crop fluctuations, we do not alter these shares over time. Potatoes. Estimating potatoes fed to livestock presents difficulties similar to those encountered in estimating grain fed in the 1950s. In the balance, subtracting seed, food, and industrial uses from reported produc- tion leaves insufficient quantities for feed use in five of the 1 l years for which we have official Soviet statistics on quantities of potatoes fed to livestock. We believe that the data inconsistencies observed in the potato balance are caused by inaccuracy in Soviet potato statistics. Production statistics are subject to an especially large margin of error because 60 percent of potato output comes from private plots.“ Reporting of the potato crop in the socialized sector also involves estimation. After potatoes are harvested, they may not be removed from the fields but stored in pits or piles. In this case the weight of output is estimated by taking the dimensions of the pile and determining the weight of l cubic meter of stored potatoes. The amount of dirt and leaves in the output is estimated by weighing several samples before and after cleaning.“ The potato balance is distorted on the utilization side by the fact that ungarnered potatoes left in the field are consumed by livestock permitted to scavenge." Potatoes fed in this way are likely to be included in officially reported quantities of potatoes fed. This is true of all pasture feed provided to livestock without prior harvesting. The weight of “pasture feed” 8‘ “ Set: above for discussion of statistics of private agricultural output. “ M. Z. Pizengol'ts, Bukhgalterskiy uchet v sellvkom khozyaystve, Moscow, I974, pp. 111-ll2. “ V.K. Radostovets et al., Spravochnik bukhgaltera sovkhozai kolkhoza, Alma Ata, 1972, p. 51 “ Pasture feed is broadly defined to include crop residues other than grass for pasture. lbid. p. 354. M.Z. Pizengol’ts et al., Bukhgal- terski uchet v sel 'sk0kh0zyayst_vennyk predpriyatiyakh, Moscow, I975, p. 94. consumed is determined by the farm‘s chief agrono- mist or zootechnician.“ The degree to which this causes understatement in gross output is probably not large.“ The question of quality of the potato crop also remains unresolved. According to the literature, large losses of potato production from spoilage occur." Earlier sources claim as much as one-fifth to one- third of the potatoes received by retail trade turn out to be unsaleable.“ The ranges in Soviet estimates of potato spoilage indicate the difficulty of developing any reasonable series of discounts over time. Any adjustment would merely add an arbitrary calculation without improving the measure. Moreover, applying any discount would throw the balance further out of line.“ Vegetables and Whole Milk. Soviet data on feeding of vegetables to livestock are scarce; indeed, there are no published data on total vegetables fed. Conse- quently, our estimates have to be based on a crude balance. The few data available report vegetable feeding on state and collective farms only. Our vege- table balance is, for most years, fairly consistent with the few references available. Soviet statements such as “l2 percent of vegetables produced by collective farms are fed by them,” °° and “l.8 million tons of vegetables produced in the communal sector were fed”"‘ are, as expected-, below the quantities fed as implied by the balance. The understatement is prob- ably accounted for by vegetables fed by the private '5 Ibid., p. 354. “ Raw potatoes are not particularly palatable. Chopping is recom- mended to increase palatability for cattle and sheep and cooking is recommended for hogs and poultry. " See above for a discussion of waste in potatoes. " Pravda, 25 August 1969, p. 2, Sovetskaya lorgovlya, No. 9, 1971, p. 15. Some of this waste is returned to farms and fed. "’ Although not affecting our potato balance, another unresolved question is the accounting for potatoes sold to procurement organi- zations. Due to a lack of sufficient storage facilities a portion of procured potatoes is left on farms for storage. Every year an unknown part of this amount is used by farms themselves (Z. G. Tresorukova, op. cit., Moscow, 1974, p. 56). If quantities used by farms are not deducted from the earlier reported marketed output, procurements would be exaggerated. ’° L.T. Dageev, Pods-obnyye promyshlenniye predpriyatiya v sel '- skom khozyaystve, Moscow, 1976, p. l4. °' Pravda, 6 August 1966, p. 2. 273 Approved for Release: 2019/07/19 C05210421
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 399 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.