Rosselkhoznadzor proudly reports that since Russia introduced its counter-sanctions, 9,000 tons of food have been destroyed.
That means these fine fellows crushed 9 million kilograms of food with tractors and dumped it in landfills, including 389,000 kilograms of meat and poultry.
It is a pity that Rosselkhoznadzor does not answer the question the whole country is interested in: who is better off because of this?
Or rather: why not “destroy” this food by letting it be eaten by people for whom even buying groceries is a financial burden?
For example, official statistics tell us that there are 617,000 children with disabilities in Russia.
Presumably, not all families with such children are low-income. Let us use the proportion for the population as a whole. In Russia, 13% live below the poverty line. That means that out of the total number of families with children with disabilities (for simplicity, let us assume there are 617,000 of them, matching the number of children), 80,210 families with a child with a disability are living below the poverty line.
So if this food had not been crushed by tractors but instead given to such families, then throughout the entire year and a half of the “counter-sanctions,” they could have received 1.5 kilograms of food per week for free, starting from August 6, 2015. A person earning less than 9,700 rubles a month (about $150 at the time) and having to care for a child with a disability on that income would probably not have turned down such help.
It turns out that even if these idiotic (and harmful) “counter-sanctions” are so important to the state, the part involving the destruction of food could at least have been handled in a way that made life a little better for 80,210 families whose lives are especially hard and bitter.
Yes, the state would have incurred certain distribution costs, but destruction is not free either.
What did we get instead?
The businesses transporting this food went bankrupt or suffered major losses.
On store shelves we now see marvelous Belarusian mussels and other delicacies that supposedly grow only on that country’s warm Atlantic coast.
The poor did not receive free food, and their lives did not become any easier.
Rising food prices hit every household in the country, but they hit the poor especially hard.
Customs officials and Rosselkhoznadzor itself became fabulously enriched, as its officials were the ones deciding, “Destroy this, but not that.” Obviously, an entrepreneur who has brought in a truckload of food will be ready to pay any bribe, so long as the goods are not destroyed.
It feels as though somewhere there is an enemy command headquarters directing the Kremlin. Every day they sit there devising a new operation called “How to make ordinary people poorer while giving corrupt officials a new opportunity,” and the Kremlin carries these operations out brilliantly.