Post-Soviet Transformations of Agriculture in the Altai Republic

The article is devoted to the spatial and temporal analysis of changes in agriculture in the Altai Republic during the post-Soviet period (after 1991). The Altai Republic is a typical agrarian and recreational region where the rural population constitutes 69.4% (as of 2025) and 15% of the population is employed in the agricultural sector. Geomorphological and climatic factors determined the specifics of agricultural development and its orientation towards animal husbandry. The transformation processes that arose after the collapse of the USSR radically modified the established traditional sub-sectors of the studied economic sector. The work reveals multidirectional trends in the development of agriculture, the results of its adaptation and restructuring in the post-Soviet period within a market economy, taking into account the industry specifics and regional features of the agricultural sector’s development. The consequences of the crisis, the volumes of production decline, and trends in the recovery of crop and livestock production are analysed. An assessment is made of the dynamics of agriculture’s share in the Gross Regional Product, and changes in the industry and territorial structure of agriculture in the region are examined. The research methodology is based on the analysis of data from Altai Kraistat and Rosstat for a thirty-year period. The study uses standard statistical methods to assess the dynamics of distribution by the rates of decline and growth of agricultural development indicators. The cause-and-effect relationships of transformation in the crop and livestock system are based on the results of expeditionary studies conducted in 2023 and 2024. During these studies, interviews with the population and visual observation of the current state of agricultural cultural landscapes were carried out. It was revealed that the positive consequences of the transformational post-Soviet processes concern an increase in the productivity of forage crops with a smaller area of cultivation, restoration of the cattle population, and an increase in meat production. Noticeable growth is observed in horse breeding and moral breeding. The greatest damage is recorded in sheep and goat breeding, specifically in the decline in wool production and a drop in livestock in these sub-sectors. Large-scale negative trends without a tendency to recovery are noted in the structure of grain farming. In general, there is a deepening of enterprise specialisation, a transition from complex farms to single-industry ones. The main reasons for the identified changes are global and regional market conditions (the balance of supply and demand for certain agricultural products), institutional factors (in particular, the distribution of land among private land users), and intersectoral competition for agricultural land (especially with the tourism and recreational industry actively developing in the region). Climate change also plays a role in this process.