Translated material
“Until you put me in jail, they won’t understand”
The Belarusian president is fighting for what is more important than oil and gas
Alexander Lukashenko considers poor-quality harvesting a crime. The Belarusian president announced this during his trip to the Brest region yesterday. “Against the backdrop of the global food crisis, when they talk about grain more than oil and gas, it is criminal to lose bread... Anyone who doesn’t understand this will face criminal charges!.. Until you put a couple of people in prison, they won’t understand,” the president said understand that he will not stand on ceremony with officials. “I won’t teach anyone, I’m starting to fulfill my promises.”Since his first election to the presidency in 1994 , Lukashenko has traditionally attached great importance to the development of agriculture . Over the years, he has held conference calls with government officials and flown in by helicopter to regions for surprise inspections during harvest times. Nowadays, presidential control over the activities of the agro-industrial complex is carried out on a smaller scale, but is not weakened. Lukashenko is always interested in the prospects for the harvest, which is expected to be harvested this year in the amount of 8.4 million tons. At the initiative of the president, Belarus has been implementing a rural revival and development program for several years now, which is based on state funding for the agro-industrial complex. The other day, Belarusian independent media calculated that from 2005 to 2007, more than 44 trillion Belarusian rubles were spent under the program, which at the current exchange rate is more than $21 billion.
“The state of Belarusian agriculture is not the worst; another question is at what price it was acquired. Against the backdrop of the golden rain that has been pouring on it in recent years, it would indeed be criminal not to have a return,” former head of the agrarian policy department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus, now chairman of the Congress of Democratic Trade Unions, Alexander Yaroshuk, told Vremya Novostei. He noted that “the profitability of agriculture in 2007 was comparable to the level of inflation, which means that it can hardly be said that such significant financial injections pay off well.” According to our interlocutor, the best way to increase the efficiency of agriculture would be to introduce private ownership of land and means of production, but the Belarusian authorities have not yet decided to take such a step.
But Mr. Yaroshuk considers the president’s harsh warnings to officials to be “populist rhetoric”: “Against the backdrop of the worsening global food crisis, the population is being mobilized to achieve a common goal. The authorities also show that they have the situation under control and global instability will not affect our country.”