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This chapter examines the Russian Far East as the former Soviet Union’s Far Eastern economic planning region. The Russian Far East is a vast and varied region forming the northeastern frontier of the Eurasian continent. Although the entire Russian territory east of the Urals is often labeled “Siberia,” the Far East is actually a separate geographic unit whose territorial size is almost equal to that of West and East Siberia. The 1990 population of the Russian Far East was only about eight million. The Soviet government sought to increase population in the Far East, both to secure the presence of Soviet/Russian power and to supply more labor resources to the region. The Far East has traditionally functioned as a resource colony for the rest of the Soviet Union. International agreements allow Russia to receive modern management expertise and extraction technology in exchange for limited development rights.

We studied crop harvested yield, as recorded in national agricultural statistics, to estimate net primary production (NPP) in agricultural regions where most of the land area is sown with a few, well-studied crops. We estimated the magnitudes and interannual variations in NPP in croplands in the U.S. Midwest using crop area and yield data obtained from the U.S. National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). Total NPP, including estimates of the above- and belowground components, was calculated from harvested-yield data by (1) conversion from reporting units of yield of the crop product (usually in volume) to mass, (2) conversion from fresh mass to dry mass, (3) estimation of aboveground yield using crop harvest indices, defined as the ratio of economic product (e.g., grain) dry mass to plant aboveground dry mass, and (4) estimation of belowground yield as a function of aboveground biomass. This approach is applied to corn, soybean, sorghum, sunflower, oats, barley, wheat, and hay in Illinois, Indiana, I...