In 1993 agriculture and forestry accounted for almost more than 1/4 of the GDP and almost 6 % of the total agricultural output of the former Soviet Union. Agriculture employed 20 % of the labor force. During the Soviet era, agriculture in Belarus consisted mainly of state and collective farms, with a sprinkling of small plots for private household use. In the early 1990s, the government based its agricultural policies on that legacy. Instead of disrupting the production of food for both domestic consumption and export, the authorities decided to maintain the large-scale farming for which they believed the existing equipment and capital stock were best suited. In 1994 the Ministry of Agriculture planned to transform collective and state farms into joint-stock companies that would be agriculturally efficient and would keep providing most of the social services in rural areas. Belarus can be separated into three agricultural regions: north; flax, fodder, grasses, and cattle, central; potatoes and pigs, and south; grazing land, hemp, and cattle. Belarus's cool climate and dense soil are well suited to fodder crops, which support herds of cattle and pigs, and temperate-zone crops wheat, barley, oats, buckwheat, potatoes, flax, and sugar beets. Belarus's soils are generally fertile, particularly in the river valleys, except in the southern marshy regions. The main enduring problem affecting the agricultural and forestry area is the Chornobyl' disaster of 1986. Belarus absorbed the bulk of the radioactive fallout from the explosion because of weather conditions on the day of the disaster. Longterm radiation affects 18 % of Belarus's most productive farmland and 21 % of its forests. contempt the Chornobyl' accident, in 1993 Belarus was still a net exporter of meat, milk, eggs, flour, and potatoes to other former Soviet republics, although its exports were routinely tested for radioactive contamination.