More thoughts on the Soviet legacy. The most impressive thing we saw in Serbia was the quality of the produce they harvested. Farmers selling their fruits and vegetables--as well as honey and homemade infusions--were everywhere, and they were uniformly gorgeous displays. Better than how they look is how they taste, which is fantastically flavorful. The best peppers I have had anywhere, and not just once, but consistently great.
So what is the problem? Well, according to one Serbian friend, it is infrastructure. The Soviet Union higly valued industrialization--the factory was the key to success in the communist paradigm. Yugoslavia had a socialist back bone, so the tenets were not such a stretch, but factories were built far from the resources needed to run them. Not such a great idea, and completely unmanageable in the era of a high efficiency and fairly flat world. People are not buying local when it comes to manufactured goods. China is king, and if you can't beat their price, you cannot hope to compete.
So what about agriculture? The good news is that Serbian soil is rich and productive--they even have a good market in that Russia will buy their produce. The problem is everything else--after harvest, where to store it? There is no farming collective to help with resources and storage--much less transport. The problems to be solved in the 21st century in Serbia are numerous, but some very simple infrastructure in farming could go a long way to helping that quadrant of the economy for them.
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