Russians are giving up growing potatoes and are increasingly switching to purchasing them at specialized enterprises. This is reported by RNS with reference to the Ministry of Agriculture.
This is how the Russian ministry commented on the data of the Central Bank on the reduction in the country's crops. They are published in the Research and Forecasting Department's report What Trends Talk About. The Central Bank called the reason for the impossibility of some ineffective players to compete with more developed farms with lower costs and modern growing and storage technologies. The exact figures are not announced in the report. At the same time, the Central Bank did not rule out an increase in the yield of marketable potatoes due to the growing yield.
The Ministry of Agriculture said that this is happening on the households. Also, the ministry noted that in agricultural organizations, crop production is gradually growing. The reason there was called the use of highly effective fertilizers, new means of protection, high-quality seeds and innovative technologies.
Last year, experts from the Gaidar Institute and RANEPA warned about the problem. According to their "Monitoring of the economic situation in Russia", the country produces about 20 million tons of crops per year. The experts noted that many businessmen, scientists and officials consider this volume sufficient, but taking into account consumption and losses, this is a very small figure. In their opinion, because of this, in the near future, Russia faces a shortage of potatoes and an increase in its imports.
Source: https://rosng.ru/