Comprehensive Target Programmes, systems of social, production, organisational, scientific and research measures drawn up following consideration of available resources and aimed at planned implementation, with a definite objective of social development in mind. They form an integral part of the long-term state economic and social development plans under developed socialism. The necessity of broadly using comprehensive programmes in management is determined by the acceleration of scientific and technical progress and the increasingly close links between different sectors and economic regions, as well as by the emergence of large intersectoral and territorial-production complexes, the formation and development of the country’s economy as an integral national economic complex; and by the increasingly complicated interdependence of production and social problems. Comprehensive programmes are developed via a programme-target approach (see Programme-Target Method), and the subordination of the measures envisaged to the objective of meeting certain social requirements by accumulating material, labour, and financial resources in the most important realms of social and economic development. Comprehensive programmes make it possible to improve the social and economic orientation of planning and management, to take fuller account of the consequences of decisions, to improve inter-sectoral links with due account of the requirements posed by the development of society as a whole, to overcome restrictions stemming objectively from the sectoral and departmental planning and management, to use the reserves in order to achieve priority goals and to ensure rapid solutions of the problems posed, and to ensure a correct balance between resources and use them more effectively. The Soviet Union’s Food Programme is a fundamentally new stage in the system of planning and management of the socialist economy, as well as the embodiment of a targetoriented and complex approach to dealing with the food problem. For the first time ever, the agro-industrial complex has been singled out as an independent realm of planning and management, thus allowing more effective coordination of territorial, sectoral, and programme-target planning. The Comprehensive Programme for Scientific and Technical Progress of the USSR is worked out for a 20-year period and becomes the backbone of corresponding long-range plans for the country’s economic and social development. In the Soviet Union, the largest comprehensive target programmes are the Food and Energy programmes, the programmes for the development of virgin and fallow lands, for the development of agriculture in the NonBlack-Earth Zone of the Russian Federation, for the construction of the BaikalAmur-Railway (BAM), the programmes for economical use of fuel and metal, for reducing the use of manual labour, for the extended production of new consumer items, for the development of several territorial-production complexes, for cooperation between the CMEA member countries, etc. In dealing with the most important social and economic problems, these programmes stipulate targets for the production of specific items, contain measures to establish the material basis of the manufacturing sector and intensify it and to develop the infrastructure, to step up 61 a complex tapping of natural resources and to protect environment. These programmes occupy an important place in the system of measures to improve planning techniques, and give the economic mechanism a greater role in raising production efficiency and ensuring higher quality of work.