Drought conditions are considered to be standard weather states

At Kazansummit the minister of agriculture and food of the Republic of Tatarstan Marat Akhmetov reported on how to attract foreign investors into agriculture as well as how Tatarstan was going to get through the drought this year, as said by media center RBC-Tatarstan.

- What kind of investors are you going to find at Kazansummit?

- Foreign companies do not trust very much the agricultural production in the Russian Federation. Obviously, it is more risky. Investors are more interested in processing, industry, petro chemistry than agriculture where they are very careful. As the forum is closely connected with Islamic world, I believe that one of the most perspective trends here is to participate in halal production.

Our republic is agricultural and the issue of food supply security is important but it not the only priority. We can supply millions of people with food owing to 3.5 million ha of tillage and the biggest cattle stock in the Russian Federation. With about 2% of tillage we produce 4.5% of total agricultural production in the Russian Federation.

We state that with effective investments and in favourable climatic conditions Tatarstan is able to produce twice more agricultural products.

However climatic conditions have been very unfavorable during the last 4 years. We would like to adopt practices of western and especially southern companies to work under drought conditions.

- What are these countries?

- Turkey and UAE. As they have some work experience it will be easier to convince them to participate in agricultural business.

- Will Tatarstan be able to solve the problem of the drought in the nearest future?

- When we faced the drought in 2009 and 2010 we treated it as an isolated case. But what we are dealing with now is the 5thdrought year. It cannot be accidental, it is climate changing. Now we are in need to restructure agriculture of our republic. Some other regions of Russia need this, too. So we should adopt practices of the countries with less precipitations and higher temperatures. Even under such conditions we can supply food, preserve cattle stock and productivity. What we cannot do is to develop further.

We should work with insurance companies. It is impossible to be stronger than the weather but on the other hand we are also weak in terms of power-to-weight ratio.

Though Tatarstan is considered to be quite developed.

- When do you think the drought will not be such a great problem for Tatarstan anymore?

- We should take into consideration the present average climatic conditions, not the favourable ones we used to have in 2000-2008.

We need diversification and modernization of AIC. We renew farm machinery and spend 7.5-8 billion rubles annually for that. We are going to continue to work in these spheres.

By Yevgeny Antonov