Opening Address at World Grain Forum.Part 1
June 6, 2009
St Petersburg
Выступление на заседании Всемирного зернового форума.
6 июня 2009 года
Санкт-Петербург
PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA DMITRY MEDVEDEV: Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, dear friends.
First and foremost, I naturally want to welcome you to St Petersburg and to thank for having come here to discuss one of the most pressing problems we face today.
I am certain that the discussions in the Forum's various venues today will be productive, since solving the problems of the grain market is one of the most important ways of ensuring food security on our planet. And though this may sound immodest, I think it was a good idea to gather everyone together to discuss this subject. When we proposed this idea it was at the G8 summit last year no one anticipated that the discussion of food security issues would be taking place during a financial crisis, but that makes what we will be discussing today more important rather than less.
The grain sector of the agricultural industry is a traditional and very significant source of revenue for our country. We intend to strengthen our position in the world grain market, in both the financial and the organisational sense. In recent years Russia really has regained its status as a major grain exporter, and as far as wheat exports are concerned we are in the top three.
Our country is indeed the largest in terms of territory - it has 40 percent of the world's black earth [black soil with a very high percentage of humus]. In total we have about 9 percent of world's reserves of arable land, and of course this gives Russia a unique competitive advantage. We now have the opportunity to put back into operation some 20 million hectares of arable land that have not been used since the radical change in our nation's economic life took place.
However, providing the world with grain is not simply a question of food security. It is also a very complex social issue that affects stability in various regions of the world. In addition to discussing greater international cooperation in this field, which I consider essential, the principal task of the Forum should be a profound analysis of what is currently happening in grain markets. In effect there are three crises financial, food, and energy that are unfortunately not only linked to one another but also capable of creating a very nasty synergistic effect.
We are all concerned about the problems of mass hunger and malnutrition. They remain one of the most difficult tests for humanity. It was this threat that occasioned one of our key Millennium Development Goals, reducing hunger in the world. Today there are a total of one billion hungry people in the world. Just think for a minute about what that figure represents! Every sixth person on the planet goes hungry. The civilised world no longer has the right to continue to ignore this situation. To put it bluntly, many of us today simply accept the fact that every five seconds a child dies of hunger on our planet. The world is increasingly concerned with revenues and profits. And that is obviously immoral.
Of course there is another problem that will be given special attention at the Forum, the extremely unstable situation in global food markets, in particular the imbalance between supply and demand which leads to constant price volatility.
Last year's sharp rise in food prices hit the poor hardest, since they spend up to 80 percent of their budget just to feed themselves. It is therefore necessary to reach a common understanding of this situation. We have to develop mechanisms to overcome the imbalance between supply and demand. And we need to ensure that exporters coordinate their programmes in order to maintain reasonable prices for grain markets. In fact, we can consider the formation of a new policy on grain production and international trade in grain.
Generally speaking I'm happy that the forthcoming discussion will not be limited to purely economic issues. I just talked about this and once again I would like to specifically point out that we must speak out loudly and clearly on our position concerning the very serious social problems related to hunger. We need to get the attention of those countries where this problem is still not considered to be important.
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В день Победы, Медведев под власовским флагом,
оплевав все заветы отцов,
шел по улице пьяным зигзагом
эскадрон молодых подлецов.
Лица схожи, как капли водицы —
Бог избавил от чувств и идей! —
шли подонки, спеша насладиться
униженьем советских людей
ahirzaman1000 1 year ago
В день Победы, Медведев под власовским флагом,
оплевав все заветы отцов,
шел по улице пьяным зигзагом
эскадрон молодых подлецов.
Лица схожи, как капли водицы —
Бог избавил от чувств и идей! —
шли подонки, спеша насладиться
униженьем советских людей
ahirzaman1000 1 year ago