Evgenia Serova - The New Times

"There is really a lot of bread in the country. This is not a problem at all. The problem is with agriculture."

The hysteria of the last week about the fact that bread is not enough, the price is growing and it is necessary to limit grain export, forced the Minister of Agriculture Alexei Gordeev to explain: everything will actually be fine. But will it be good? Evgenia Serova, the head of the analytical center of the agro -voltage economy, answered this New Times, and since September, the chief adviser to the International Investment Center (Food and Agriculture Organization) at the UN.

Evgenia Serova - Irina Yasina

“The village should work
- 2-3% of the labor force " -

So what caused the current increase in bread prices in Russia?
Grain prices are rising around the world, as well as oil prices. However, the cost of grain in bread is not more than 20%. This means that the remaining 80% is transport, rent, wages, anything.
All that is going on now is pure PR. Bread is getting more expensive. The president immediately called the Minister of Agriculture. The Minister of Agriculture immediately responded. There will be bread. There really is a lot of bread in the country. This is not a problem at all.
After all, this is a terribly effective business. If we still have land legislation ... The main thing that happened in the Putin era in agriculture is the adoption of the Land Code and the Law on Electric Electric Transport. But this great law stopped all the land in the country. Before that, we have 6-7%, some say, even up to 10% of the land was in circulation. The Earth passed from ineffective owners to effective. Now everything has stopped. Now world prices are just flying up. For the first time in centuries, grain prices have a long treasury trend. And then there’s talk about the ban on export. For once, we can sell annually renewable resources!

And what would the authorities should do now - in a situation where grain prices fly up?
The first thing you need is to recall land legislation and write new ones, but I do not see who could do this. The second - you need to find those growth points where you do not need a lot of money to achieve competitiveness in world markets. This is grain, it is a sunflower, it is a pork, it is a bird. It is clear that this is not beef. We again invest in beef. This is a gyuly business. There are no competitions to withstand or too many public resources will be required.
And the third is to understand that the growth of productivity, labor productivity in agriculture will be inevitably associated with leaching of rural employment. In order not to create the Indian effect of rural poverty, when whole dead territories can be formed, on which drunk and tearing live, you need to think what to do. That is, it is not a cow to buy them and create a cooperative to them, but to think about alternative employment for these people. Russia has great potential. We have huge forests. Wild mushrooms, berries have amazing demand in the world market. We have 30% of the population should live in rural areas, like around the world. And 2-3% of the labor force should engage in agriculture.
Now a national project is shovels and a fork; We give a small loan, let them buy a cow, we will help the cooperative to create so that they give milk. This is a deception of everyone. This is a deception of taxpayers, it is a deception of young people. And then, a cow is a hard labor. This is not a way out of rural poverty, this is a dead end. This is pure PR and highly cynical deception of the population. I don’t even remember such cynicism in Komsomol.

"Agriculture
- leaves for the "north" -

And what to do?
We have absolutely lost scientific schools in agrarian science. And here you can only in Petrovsky, in a quaser to invite the founders of the school from the outside, to pay any money. Or you need to massively send to study.
It is important to end the regional principle of support for agriculture: it does not create competition, but leads, in fact, to trade wars between the regions.
What are regions support? Tatarstan has money, they pay 50 kopecks per liter of milk, and in the end it turns out that the Chuvash neighbors need to cut cows. Khanty-Mansi municipalities keep poultry farms in the south of the Tyumen region. For budget money. And there no one can compete with them. They replace everything. Any price support, everything that concerns the market should be exclusively the prerogative of the federal government. And then we have agriculture to move to the North.
We interviewed 1,500 students and graduates in five regions, under what conditions they would go to the village. 20% replied that if there was the Internet, then they would go. I'm not talking about the phone, there is a much larger percentage. And in our national project - only housing. Personnel officers who no longer understand the needs of youth are engaged in attracting young people in the countryside-just because of an age-related difference. What Internet, people have nowhere to live! People can earn on housing. But I myself will not create infrastructure in the village. Today in the village you can get 20-30 thousand a month, with this money you can build housing for yourself, but modern housing is not just a box of building. These are modern communications - roads, communication, the Internet in the end.

Gosmonopoli - they
- And in Africa of the monopoly -

But all these are trifles. The main thing is state monopolism. There is a bunch of state corporations in agriculture. We again did not emancipate a person from the state. We do not have this petty entrepreneurial environment. The employee is not formed - responsible, qualified. Again all and all for itself, the state "stick" crushes. People, as before, run from the village. Our survey showed: 100% of parents want the children to leave. A terrible thing happens in the villages. Poverty from which there is no way out. This poverty is not only material, but already spiritual. Grain can be sown without a state, but it is impossible to break out of this vicious circle without a state. How to evaluate the work of the governor? I say: you need to watch the standard of living of the rural population. I do not care how much grains produce there. I worry how people live there.