Soviets Admit Bad Harvests From 1981-85

MOSCOW — The Soviet Union, breaking more than five years of silence on its grain production results, has disclosed that it suffered a succession of bad harvests from 1981 to 1985.

Figures published in the Central Statistical Board’s yearly handbook on economic performance show that average annual grain output in these years was 180.3 million metric tons. This was almost 25% below the planned annual production of 239 million tons and represented the worst performance of Soviet agriculture in a five-year economic plan period since 1966-1970.

Failure to meet grain production targets was one of the chief Soviet economic problems of the early 1980s. Moscow has officially estimated this year’s harvest at 210 million tons, which would be its second-highest ever.

The release of data for 1981 to 1985 reflected Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s conviction that the country should acknowledge that it has had failures as well as successes.

Startling Drop

The most startling figure revealed in the handbook is for 1981, when the harvest is said to have fallen to 158.2 million tons. Even the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose estimates of the Soviet harvest are regarded as among the most authoritative in the West, did not predict such a total crop failure. Its forecast at the time was 170 million tons.

The combined annual average of 180.3 million tons for the years 1981-85 was much lower than the average 205 million produced each year between 1976 and 1980 and was below the average 181.6 million harvested annually between 1971 and 1975.

The succession of bad harvests forced Moscow to dig deep into its foreign exchange reserves to import billions of dollars worth of grain from the United States, Canada, Argentina and Eastern Europe.