President Mikhail S. Gorbachev said today his country needs Western assistance to make his reform program work, and he promised that any aid will be repaid. Gorbachev spoke at a news conference after a day of meetings with Italian Premier Giulio Andreotti, the president of the European Community. Andreotti is a leading proponent of providing aid to the Soviet Union. No agreements were reached in the talks about Italian or European aid to boost Gorbachev's reform program. Gorbachev said the Soviet Union needs help producing more food and consumer goods for the market, and that factories need a chance to work with foreign firms to boost their productivity. As an example of Soviet inefficiency, Gorbachev has said 25 percent of the nation's crops are lost during harvesting and storage. The resident of the Russian Federation, the Soviet Union's largest republic, today warned of a food shortage ``catastrophe'' in Russia unless efficiency improves. ``We have to gather it carefully, preserve it and get it onto the table of the Russian people,'' Boris N. Yeltsin said. ``The existing food situation in our republic is critical,'' he said in an appeal on the front page of the Sovietskaya Rossia newspaper. ``To prevent a catastrophe, we must improve it immediately.'' As an incentive, Yeltsin said the government would issue special coupons to agricultural workers, from farmers to tractor drivers, allowing them to buy goods that have been in short supply. Russian Prime Minister Ivan Silayev warned in a separate interview that if the market is not soon saturated with food and consumer goods ``the situation will be unpredictable.'' ``The prices will simply skyrocket and the shadow economy will capture everything,'' he told Pravitelstvenny Vestnik newspaper. Gorbachev said the next two years of reforms will be crucial. ``In these two years, in which we will have to make the most difficult changes, we need this kind of help,'' Gorbachev said. Some of the aid should be given quickly ``to reduce the difficulty of the problems, and so perestroika does not slow down,'' he said. However, he added, the Soviet Union ``cannot depend on foreign sponsors'' to fix its economy, but must depend largely on itself. Aid to his country will not be ``a handout,'' he said, but temporary assistance that must be paid back. The West German government has guaranteed $3.1 billion in bank loans to the Soviet Union, and together with France it pushed the European Community to endorse an immediate $15 billion aid program. But European leaders refused to go along with the plan, as did leaders of the world's seven largest capitalist powers meeting in Houston, Texas, earlier this month. President Bush says a program to provide the Soviet Union with Western advisers and know-how would be of greater benefit than economic aid until the Soviet Union makes greater changes in its economy. He also has asked Gorbachev to cut aid to countries like Cuba.
