Leave aside the details for a moment. Sanctions, busting of them, all of that. We’d also not try to claim that current day Russia is some laissez faire paradise. We can though still make a useful point about the really basic economic structure:

Pakistan is set to import two million metric tonnes (MT) of wheat from Russia with cash payment

Russia is a wheat exporter. Which is a startling change from earlier decades of course. When one of the grand obsessions of the international food trade was where is the Soviet Union going to import its wheat from?

Again, we do not claim that Russia is currently a free market paradise. Nor do we think that Tsarist Russia was one of those either. And yet both Tsarist Russia and the current day one are major gain exporters. The Soviet Union was a major grain importer.

The Soviet Union also had a thoroughly planned and scientifically underpinned food production system with no even hint of any market influences. So much for planned food production systems without either market prices or market incentives.

As varied types wibble about how government must do more to plan and support British farming that’s a lesson that’s well worth recalling.

No?