The stubborn efforts of the self-proclaimed President of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, to keep the country’s economy in check led Belarusians to a potato crisis this spring, Politico reports.
Critics of the authoritarian leader say that Lukashenko has distorted the country’s economy by wanting to set prices for basic products.
In the fall of 2022, Lukashenko introduced price caps in stores, hoping to prevent inflation, but instead farmers are no longer interested in growing the unprofitable potatoes. Opponents of the regime say that these decisions led to a decline in production and last year forced many cash-strapped farmers to sell their crops to Russia, thus leaving local grocery stores without potatoes.
The slight increase in the price of potatoes could not keep up with the increase in costs for farmers and sellers, and demotivated farmers planted fewer potatoes.
Lev Lvovskiy, academic director of the Belarusian think tank BEROC, said:
“If you know from the history of the Soviet Union, when people don’t have motivation, you can’t really force them to do work very well.”
Ironically, Lukashenko himself ran a collective farm in eastern Belarus during the waning years of Soviet rule.
The prices imposed by Minsk made trading potatoes with Russia a financially profitable business. According to BEROC data, in March potatoes in Russia cost twice as much as in Belarus. In 2024, 200 thousand tons of potatoes went to Russia from Belarus.
However, the Belarusian government has not abandoned the idea of trading with Russia. Lukashenko himself has instructed farmers to grow enough to feed both Minsk and Moscow. In May, he emphasized that they must help their brotherly people and, moreover, they can earn a good money.
Seeing that the new rules had created a potato shortage, the regime temporarily banned potato exports in December 2024. Lvovsky told Politico that many farmers responded to the ban by marking good potatoes as spoiled and continuing to send them to Russia. As a result,
potatoes in Belarusian stores in March and April of this year were small, sometimes rotten, and in short supply.
Aleś Alachnovič, economic adviser to exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, pointed out that this demonstrates how Lukashenko and his government can artificially create a shortage of products that were previously widely available. The Belarusian regime, however, disagrees, and has indicated that everything is fine and there is enough produce on the shelves at reasonable prices.
To encourage farmers to grow more and sell more locally, officials raised the price of potatoes in April. In late May, in order to combat the potato shortage, imports of potatoes from European countries that the regime considers “unfriendly” were also allowed. Lvovsky noted that the availability of potatoes has now improved.
In June, Lukashenko blamed the potato shortage on certain, unnamed individuals who had done so to show the government in bad light. At a government meeting, he said that there had been a huge supply of potatoes, but someone had limited the supply to point out the president’s wrongdoing by interfering in the price formation process. “But when [the State Control Committee] showed up with handcuffs and placed them on the table, potatoes became available,” Lukashenko said.
In May,
the State Control Committee called on shoppers to report stores that were out of stock or selling them at too high a price.
Lvovsky said part of the strategy is simply to keep the retail chains busy, hoping they will “be so scared of prison that they will conjure potatoes out of thin air.”
Vladzimir Astapenka, Tsikhanouskaya’s spokesman in Brussels, said the events only further demonstrate the ineffectiveness of Lukashenko’s policies. He added that Lukashenko is trying to survive and stay afloat.
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