Belarus Officials Face Demotion to Farm Managers

In a dramatic escalation of state control over the agricultural sector, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has signed a decree that makes regional officials personally responsible for underperforming state farms and livestock deaths. The new policy directly ties the careers of district executive committee chairmen to the fate of the country’s most struggling agricultural enterprises.

Under the new rules, each regional head will be assigned a single, chronically unprofitable farm. If the official succeeds in boosting the farm’s performance and reducing livestock losses, they will be rewarded with a financial bonus. However, failure to meet targets will result in the loss of a significant salary supplement designated for “complexity, tension, and intensity of labor.”

The decree contains an even starker penalty for underperformance. With the president’s approval, a regional chairman who fails to turn around their assigned farm can be demoted and appointed as the director of that very same failing enterprise. This measure effectively forces officials who cannot manage from a distance to become hands-on farm managers themselves.

This initiative is part of the annual, highly publicized “battle for the harvest,” a term evoking Soviet-style mobilization campaigns. Lukashenko recently reinforced this approach during a personal visit to the fields, where he demanded “iron discipline” and faster work to prevent crop losses. While inspecting new domestic-made combine harvesters, he directly questioned operators on their effectiveness and warned farm management about the unacceptability of livestock deaths.

However, independent economists criticize this top-down, command-and-control approach as outdated and inefficient. Analyst Ales Gudiya described the annual harvest campaign as the “31st season of the same TV series,” where the plot remains unchanged: a struggle against bad weather, broken equipment, and falsified reports. He argues it is a ritual more focused on preserving a bygone era than securing a prosperous future.

Gudiya highlights a stark paradox: neighboring countries like Poland and Lithuania, which operate in similar challenging climates, have built successful agricultural sectors without resorting to such mobilization tactics. “Poland’s agriculture is a brand, with its products sold across European markets,” he notes, contrasting it with Belarus’s system of state subsidies and prime-time news reports from the fields.

Despite Belarus having a seemingly more advanced agricultural base in the 1990s, the expert concludes that its state-managed system has fallen far behind. While Lithuania has become a significant grain exporter and Poland a food-exporting powerhouse, Belarus remains mired in a “battle” against internal inefficiencies and a struggle to meet centrally planned targets.