Quote:

jrv--i'm pretty sure you need to leave russia out of your statement.


The WSJ article was written around the Ukraine and not Russia. I sloppily lumped all of the ex-USSR states together; a bad habit I have since I grew up in another era, and Russia is so large you can usually get away with assuming there's a little of everything somewhere...

This paper http://www.fas.usda.gov/wap/circular/2003/03-06/Wap%2006-03.pdf has a graph at the bottom of page 3 that is not consistent with the WSJ article. Wheat production does seem to have increased substantially after the USSR collapsed, but the peak wasn't much higher than the USSR-era peak, and it has declined in the last few years (I think - they didn't feel the need to label the timeline axis of the chart).

A quick look through that site doesn't reveal any good historical trend data. The WSJ article dwelled considerably on the problem of American farmers facing Ukrainian competition on world markets but I'm not sure where they got their data.
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