Geography favors Soviet agriculture much less than it does Western Europe or the United States. Rainfall is inadequate and undependable over twothirds of the Soviet agricultural area. Hence one of the principal aims of the Brezhnev agricultural program is not only to increase crop yields but also to stabilize them against drought. To an extraordinary degree, the new agricultural policy emphasizes reclamation and especially irrigation. For more than a decade, in fact, reclamation has been the fastest-growing category of capital investment in the Soviet economy. Allocations of capital in irrigation, drainage, and other forms of land improvement have doubled in each of the last three five-year plans. More than 32 billion rubles were invested for these purposes during the decade 1965–75, and the pace has grown steadily each year. By the Tenth Five-Year Plan (1976–80), scheduled capital investment for reclamation and land improvement had reached 40 billion rubles, compared with 0.58 billion rubles in 1960. Soviet investment in irrigation is now the largest in the world. Whereas traditionally it had been focused on Central Asian cotton, it has now shifted decisively to the production of grain in the Ukraine and the southern regions of Russia. This means the massive development of a delicate agricultural technology in an area where it had been little used before.

More stable harvests in the Soviet Union would have important consequences for the West. In recent years, droughts in Russia and Kazakhstan have been one of the major uncertainties in Western grain markets, as sudden and massive purchases by the Soviet Union have played havoc with world prices.