Excerpt
The following articles describe the conservation implications of the redevelopment of four former countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern-Central Europe: Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Poland, and Romania. The four countries differ geographically from a mountainous border with China, to the Black Sea Beaches and Baltic Seaports (Figure 1). They also differ in stages of redevelopment. An example is the number of Internet users currently in each country. Kazakhstan and Ukraine—the two largest countries—have the least Internet users with two percent of the population. Romania has five percent and Poland 17 percent Internet users.1 By contrast, 39 percent of the German population and 59 percent of the U.S. population are on the Internet.
All four countries are rich in agricultural and/or industrial resources and all have promising futures (Table 1). All four have large areas with productive deep fertile soils and all have resources that can support an industrial complex.
In these countries that had been influenced by the former Soviet Union, agriculture has undergone changes or is undergoing changes that radically affect the way crops are managed. For 40 to 70 years, depending on the country, agricultural management was based on a …
Footnotes
Warren J. Busscher is a research soil scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Agricultural. Research Service in Florence. South Carolina Jerzy B. Lipiec is a professor of soil science at the Institute of Agrophysics in Lublin. Poland.
- Copyright 2004 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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