Chickens are a surprising bellwether for international economic and political issues. Sounding for all the world like some modern-day Khrushchevian Red Plenty economic master plan, the Uzbek government has demanded that not only agriculture do more, but that industry reduce costs and increase production -- just like that. More more more for less less less. So why the chicken handouts?

One indication might be in the dramatic increase this year in remittances back to Uzbekistan. The Central Bank of Russia recently released a report that suggests a nearly 50% increase in remittances from Russia to Uzbekistan in 2011, which indicates a flagging economy in the Central Asian nation. Uzbekistan, a gas-exporting country, has also been experiencing gas shortages and is globally ranked as poorly on economic freedom as it is on human rights or political liberties.

But Uzbekistan is hardly the only country to react to a changing political climate through chickens. In the early 1990s, a collapsing Gorbachev-era Russia was experiencing food shortages and hunger. President George H.W. Bush came up with a win-win solution: give surplus U.S. chicken meat to Russia. The U.S. has an insatiable appetite for white chicken breast meat, but in the process produces far more dark chicken leg meat than it could possibly consume. President Bush took that excess and sent it to Russia. The Russians devoured it, proclaiming the beauty of such enormous drumsticks, and to this day chicken hindquarters in Russian are often called "Bush's Legs."

Of course, good will and chicken gratitude did not last. By the 2000s, Russian President Vladimir Putin was complaining about the Americans' use of antibiotics, hormones, and sterilization in U.S. chicken. Russia may have accounted for 22% of American chicken exports, but the fears over the quality of U.S. chicken prompted a drastic curtailment of its production in 2010.

Did it matter that this explosion of concern in the quality of chicken -- which first saw widespread public expression in 2002 or so -- just happened to coincide with the rise in Russian oil-driven economic vitality and a souring of relations with the U.S. over missile defense? Or that Vladimir Putin's 2010 ban on Bush's Legs also took place right when there was a souring of relations (again) over missile defense negotiations and the New Start de-nuclearization treaty?

It certainly couldn't be because Russian chicken is any better. The Russian Consumer Rights Protection Society found in a June 2010 survey that 8 in 10 domestic Russian chickens sold at the supermarket tested positive for salmonella. Even so, Russians prefer fresh Russian chickens to frozen U.S. chickens, and buy them accordingly (China is following a similar trend -- leading to an incredible oversupply in the U.S. of dark meat chicken). But Moscow isn't above giving their own chicken farmers a little boost.