Food Programme
The Food Programme was carried out enhance, and improve, the conditions of Soviet agriculture by improving the planning mechanism during the Eleventh Five-Year Plan (1981–1985) and Twelfth Five-Year Plan (1986–1990).
The Programme
Leonid Brezhnev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, told the November 1981 Central Committee plenum that work had begun on a new food programme. on 24 May 1982 Brezhnev told a Central Committee plenum that the goal of the new Food Programme was to enhance, and improve, productivity and output of Soviet agriculture. The basic elements of the planning mechanism and its administrative and organisational features of Soviet agriculture remained unchanged. The bureaucracy was reorganised to improve efficiency by establishing new institutions and investing more money on agriculture in the form of procurement prices. The Soviet Government would build roads, cultural facilities and consumer services close to unproductive farms to increase their productivity. This increased expenditure amounted to 30 billion rubles in 1983, and food subsidy on meat, milk, bread and potatoes increased by around 51 million rubles. In other words, when a Soviet consumer bought agricultural products, it would be less than half of what the Soviet Government invested on transporting the goods from the farms to the consumer facilities. The Food Programme was initiated in 1982 and would end in 1990 at the end of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan.