The impact of Russian food security policy on the performance of the food system

Abstract

Food security has guided Russia’s food policy since 2010. The article examines the impact of food security policy on the food system. The Russian model of food security combines government intervention in the form of assistance for domestic production while simultaneously restricting market access. Food security does not appear to have a deleterious impact on the food system. We measure impact on four dimensions. Financial support for agriculture continues to increase in nominal rubles. In food production, the beef and dairy branches continue to lag, but increased grain production has made Russia a global leader in grain exports. Average per capita food consumption improved, although the poor consume much less, and the decline of the ruble affects the way Russians shop. The largest impact of food security has been on food trade. Food security policy has brought food to the forefront as an instrument of foreign policy. Food trade is politicized, witnessed by the food embargo against the West and food import bans against Turkey and Ukraine.     

Travelling images and projected representations

This article examines how Mormons and Mormonism were represented in Norway in the period before and after their arrival as missionaries, c. 1840–1860. The religion came into existence in a US context of religious pluralism, where the idea, though not necessarily the practice, of religious freedom was central. It has been argued that the persecution of Mormons in the United States had to be coined in non-religious terms, and the religion represented as a fraud and orientalised as an un-American threat to the republic. The Norwegian religious context differed significantly as heterodoxy was opposed and only hesitantly tolerated in a limited scale. The article demonstrates how inimical images of Mormonism present in the United States were imported to Norway, and to a large part found resonance in inherent stereotypes of religious otherness already present. As Mormons changed from being an occidental abstraction to a domestic ‘problem’ in around 1850, the discourse of Mormonism as religious otherness was more openly framed within religious terms.