Lukashenko’s potato racket sparks outrage from regime opponents

Alexander Lukashenko’s stubborn grip on the Belarusian economy plunged the potato-happy country into a spud shortage this spring.

Critics of the authoritarian ruler, who in January grabbed a seventh term in power, say he has warped the economy with strict price controls on staples like potatoes — while encouraging citizens to snitch on grocery stores that flout regime rules. 

The limits, launched by Lukashenko in October 2022 as he aimed to keep prices low and stave off inflation, instead made potatoes far less profitable for farmers to produce. 

Opponents say that decisions made by Lukashenko’s team stunted production last year and pushed many cash-strapped farmers to sell their produce to neighboring Russia, humiliating the Minsk regime and crippling grocery stores expected to sell potatoes on the cheap.

Paltry potato price increases weren’t keeping up with rising costs for farmers and retailers, and the country’s demotivated farmers in turn planted fewer potatoes. Belarus harvested 3.1 million tons of potatoes in 2024, down from more than 4 million a year prior.

“If you know from the history of the Soviet Union, when people don’t have motivation, you cannot really force them to do work very well,” said Lev Lvovskiy, academic director at the flagship Belarusian BEROC economic think tank.

The irony: Lukashenko himself once led a collective farm in Gorodets, in the east of modern-day Belarus, during the twilight years of Soviet communism.

The price controls instituted by Minsk made selling to Russia a highly profitable proposition. Potatoes cost over twice as much in Russia as in Belarus in March, according to BEROC data. And Belarus exported about 200,000 tons of potatoes to Russia in 2024, making it the No. 1 supplier of the staple crop to its neighbor. 

The financial incentives of trade with Russia aren’t lost on the government. Lukashenko himself has implored farmers to produce enough potatoes to feed both Minsk and Moscow. “We need to help our Russian kinfolk. And besides, we will earn good money from it,” he said in May.

Rotten potatoes

Due to the resulting shortage, however, the regime temporarily banned the export of potatoes — including to Russia — absent a license beginning in December 2024. Many farmers have responded to the restrictions by labeling healthy potatoes as spoiled, and continued to funnel them to Russia, Lvovskiy told POLITICO. 

The result of the upheaval: Small, scarce and sometimes rotten potatoes in Belarusian grocery stores, a phenomenon that escalated in March and April.

This shows how “Lukashenko and his administration can artificially create deficits of goods that were in enormous numbers before,” said Aleś Alachnovič, economic adviser to exiled Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya.

That’s not the regime’s line. 

“We made adjustments to the government resolution several times based on the reality on the ground. Thus, all negative trends in trade and in manufacturing were nipped in the bud. Price regulation did not cause any imbalances. There is a sufficient amount of goods on the shelves at reasonable prices,” Ivan Vezhnovets, first deputy minister of antimonopoly regulation and trade, said in a statement in March.

In a sign of just how much the market moves in accordance with Lukashenko’s wishes, so-called washed potatoes — better-quality spuds not under the price controls — remained on shelves but at significantly higher prices.

To incentivize farmers to grow more and sell domestically, officials jacked up the maximum price of the regular potatoes in April.

And in late May, the state reversed a ban on imports of certain foodstuffs, including potatoes, from European Union countries classed as “unfriendly,” to try to address the self-inflicted shortage.

“Now, [availability is] getting better,” Lvovskiy told POLITICO. 

But apart from massaging international trade, Minsk’s solution to the crisis in supermarkets has been to assert even more control. 

Lukashenko in June suggested that unnamed “certain individuals” had manufactured the shortage to punish the government’s economic policy.

“There were plenty of potatoes. But the supply was limited in order to demonstrate the adverse effects of the president interfering with pricing practices. But when [the State Control Committee] showed up with handcuffs and placed them on the table, potatoes became available,” he said at a government conference.

In early May, the regime’s State Control Committee launched a hotline for shoppers to report grocery stores that either weren’t selling potatoes or charged too much.

“Part of the strategy is just to harass all these retail chains in [the] hope that they would be so afraid of prison that they would come up with potatoes from pure air,” Lvovskiy said.

It isn’t exactly a foolproof plan.

“We believe that it proves, once again, the inefficiency of the policies that Lukashenko is pursuing, definitely,” said Vladzimir Astapenka, the Brussels-based representative for international and European cooperation in Tsikhanouskaya’s United Transitional Cabinet in exile. “But he tries to survive. He tries to stay afloat.”