It is now illegal to export food without a permit. Directly across the aisle, private vendors were selling thick, lean steaks for 450,000 rubles. Private stalls raise their own produce and meat or buy it from private wholesalers. There are just too many of them. The fish rots from the head.
Industry is in no better shape.
Westerners buy little, in part because Belarus factories are so hobbled by economic controls that they spend little money to modernize and are no longer competitive. Nor has Belarus tried much to sell to the West . The country's biggest trading partner by far, Russia, is now too hard pressed itself to buy many of the nation's televisions and tractors. Yet factories continue producing. By some estimates, many warehouses are stuffed with six months' supply of goods.