Speech at Meeting on Agriculture Sector Development.Part 2
October 2, 2009
Maloarkhangelsk, Orel Region
Вступительное слово на совещании по вопросам развития сельского хозяйства.
2 октября 2009 года
Орловская область, Малоархангельск
Russia has regained its status as one of the worlds major grain producers and is now one of the biggest grain exporters alongside the United States, Canada, and the European Union. We hosted the Grain Forum this year. The event was a success and we declared our ambitions big ambitions. Just to remind you of our goals, we plan to increase our grain export capacity to around 50 million tons over the coming eight or ten years, making our country a world leader in this sector. Despite our difficult climate, we have all the right conditions to achieve this goal. We only need to speed up the process. This year, Russia should be able to export an estimated 20 million tons, perhaps slightly less or slightly more, time will tell. But this is all tied into the logistics issue as well. I said before that our storage facilities need modernisation and that we have insufficient transport capacity. In the Central Federal District alone existing capacity is sufficient for long-term storage of no more than 40 percent of the harvest collected.
I spoke with the Governor of Kursk Region Alexander Mikhailov yesterday, while I was in Kursk. Last year saw a good harvest, and the grain was sold in April. The money for it has already been paid, but the grain is still in the silos. What do we do in this situation? Where will we store this years harvest? This years harvest is also quite big.
We have infrastructure bottlenecks throughout the whole chain, from the silos to the port facilities. Total grain handling capacity at our ports currently comes to around 20 million tons, but if we want to reach export level we need to increase capacity to 50 million tons. We should aim at bringing capacity up to 30 million-40 million tons over the next few years. In other words, we need to double grain handling capacity in the ports over the coming years. This is not an easy undertaking. The main export route at the moment is via the Black Sea, with half of our grain exports going through the deep water port of Novorossiysk. But we want to diversify our grain exports, and this includes developing exports to the Asia-Pacific region countries.
The problem here is that our three ports in the Far East, Nakhodka, Vladivostok and Vanino, have combined capacity of just 2 million tons. This is nothing, and so decisions are needed. We need to build new grain handling facilities and new silos, and we also need specialised transport vehicles and need to develop the approach roads. I hope that the recently created United Grain Company will help in this work. One of its tasks is to develop the grain markets infrastructure, including by raising private investment. Of course, state funding alone cannot resolve all of these problems.
Another problem is that of developing the foodstuff and processing industries. We have not seen much progress in this sector yet. We began working more actively on this issue when the national project got underway, but we still do not have full agricultural processing. Unfortunately, it is the farmers themselves who end up bearing a large share of the costs in the processing and sales sectors, and this is slowing down farm development and agricultural production development in general. We need to encourage competition in order to change this situation. The crisis period makes this particularly important, and this is the task now before the regions and the responsible agencies. We need to develop a modern foodstuff and processing industry, and only then will be able to really tackle the employment problem. We all know that a third of the countrys population works in the countryside. This is the result of our countrys historical development. This creates a number of problems, but it also gives us a number of advantages. It creates a particular hard-working way of life, a difficult life, especially given the insufficient mechanisation and backwardness in many areas of agriculture. This is something we all need to work on together then, all the more so as the experts calculate that one agricultural worker creates jobs for ten people in processing and sales. This creates a multiplication effect then that benefits other people.
It is hard to compete against foreign traders with access to cheap credit resources. Lending to the agriculture sector is therefore still one of our priorities. I expect that you will share your views on the current situation today and on the opportunities we have, including through the state support programmes that will remain in place in a number of areas.
http://www.kremlin.ru
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urazhai, uuuuuurrrrrrrraaaaaaa!!!!
1Bolivia1 1 year ago