Remember my rather dismissive account of the UK’s attempt to teach the Russians how to fish, rather than inundate them with free fish? And the ensuing Big Mac Attack?
I have just heard from a former member of the UK Agriculture Ministry MAFF (by no means related to naff) who was engaged on all that work back in early Yeltsin Russia:
I liked your Model Farm item, but it was a bit incomplete. Fact is, that we in MAFF got so p*ss*d off with KHF and their byzantine procedures that we found some Departmental money of our own that we could legitimately gift to UK private-sector industry (in this case the seed-potatoes sector) to plant the stuff directly on Russian sacred land on the Model Farm territory, with the full and happy support of the Russians.
In the event the yield from the UK seed potatoes was no less than five times what Russian native stock would have achieved, so the Russians were well pleased. We showed the successful plantings to Minister Gummer when he visited in July 1992, an event which was duly photographed by all the local media concerned.
Subsequently, the local Russians bought more seed-potato stock from the UK suppliers, and continued the contract. So, in an odd way, the UK public-sector Model Farm project in St Petersburg actually worked.
But he draws a shy veil over our attempts to export UK dairy expertise to the St Petersburg MolokoKombinat…
For linguistic buffs among you,
moloko is Russian for milk. This is a classic Slav basic root word. In other variants the first ‘o’ disappears to give
mleko (Polish and Serbian) and
mlijeko in Croatian/Bosnian. Not to forget
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