Five years ago, the replacement of the entire foreign one with Russian began. Power and business calculated profits, and citizens - losses

The import substitution program is five years old. Initially, it was conceived as an ideological blow to the West, which can be used in parallel as the support of a domestic manufacturer and the search for internal reserves for economic growth. The program is approaching its anniversary with ambiguous results. On the one hand, certain successes were achieved here. But Russia could not get rid of imports in key spheres: foreign goods mimic under domestic, and various forms of lobbyism have bloomed in the country. "New" studied how the Russian authorities and business conducted an offensive on foreign food and medicine. There were more problems than reasons for pride.

Andryukha, we have cheese! On the horses!

The most noticeable achievements are declared in agriculture - here the Russian government boldly puts a plus for itself. “We have already reached the level of pork and poultry meat five years ago, and now, according to a number of key food products, we are fully consistent with the plan of the National Food Safety Program,” says Alexander Nikulin, director of the Agrarian Research Center for Agrarian Research. - The assortment of domestic dairy products, vegetables, fruits has increased. The growth of the agrarian industry led to the fact that the process of import substitution really passed [successfully]. ” Even Russia almost completely replaced the foreign grain with its own - but this would happen without help in the form of counter -sanctions by the Russian leadership.

Another question is the price that was paid for the triumph of domestic farmers.

Product prices since 2014 have grown steadily, and the replacement of imported vegetables with a domestic analogue only fueled inflation. “Here we had the task of providing ourselves with domestic tomatoes. We are North Country, and by definition, in our conditions, tomatoes will be more expensive than Chinese. We will build greenhouses, we will make our artificial tomatoes, but their price will be higher than the price of tomatoes from Turkey. It is difficult not to get carried away with the idea of ​​the besieged fortress (“We must produce everything ourselves”), ”Nikulin shakes his head. - Another view of food security says that the worldwide process of food production is quite calm: everyone specializes in what he has a competitive advantage. We have wonderful soils for growing wheat, corn, sunflower. You can specialize on this, but it is impossible to do everything in the world, and say that we should have a ham and cheese better than French. This can be done, but it is terribly expensive. ”

For a simple person, the desire to replace the entire “enemy” food with a patriotic pork came in a significant increase in the cost of food.

“Food security is not independence from the external market, but a situation in which the government provides all population groups with a set of food sufficient for an active and healthy life. Since 2014, we have increased the gap between the group of the most wealthy and most unsecured people in terms of food costs. This gap was especially felt in 2016, ”says Natalya Shagayda, director of the Center for Agricultural Food Policy at the RANEPA.

The rapid impoverishment of the population, which President Putin even mentioned in the message to the Federal Assembly, is also a consequence of sanctions wars and, accordingly, import substitution programs. “This is one of the most important indicators of the level of society, the indicator of Engel: the less it is spent on food, the more developed, civilized and safely. We have exceeded this indicator for 30%, which is a lot, ”adds Alexander Nikulin.

Domestic fields are still cultivated by foreign technology: in the best case for the kvass patriot, we are talking about Belarus tractors (but rather small farmers use it), in the worst-about German, Japanese or Dutch agricultural equipment. At the same time, a significant part of the beet seeds, sunflower, potatoes, corn, vegetables are also imported. The ranks of imported even replenish the seeds of Russian selection, the original varieties of which are taken out for reproduction abroad, then to import into the country, says Shagayda. Parasites protection products are also not always made in Russia, but you can reassure itself at least by the fact that the country is firmly and without any foreign region is ready to provide all fertilizers. What we can do - we can.

To increase the “Russianness” in a separate tomato, you need to at least improve the level of agrarian science in the country. Yes, and tractors in Russia produce at least 10 different models - just buy them. But this is not very consistent with the ideological construct, on which the story with import substitution is actually based. “The ban on products from the outside means that they will not be used here in any way. This means that food should be destroyed. We will not even use these products for livestock feed. We will crush everything, we do not need it, ”says economist Igor Nikolaev. Initially, the injection of hysteria was the primary, even if most people were against such handling products even at the very beginning, and only then hypothetical support of farmers.

Not everyone supports. According to Alexander Nikulin, the Russian agricultural producers are, in principle, a protectionist policy is beneficial, but these are greenhouse conditions:

After removing the embargo, competition with foreign products will be very difficult to withstand.

In the current draw, the entire profit has large agricultural holdings (the same Miratorg, whose President Viktor Linnik at the end of June proposed to abandon Hamon for patriotic purposes): there are several dozen of them, but they have millions of lands of land in the property. For comparison, the area of ​​a typical Soviet collective farm was on average equal to five thousand hectares. Small manufacturers have no chances to compete with giants. Agricultural holdings, in turn, feel so free that they already want, for example, to prohibit the import of foreign meat. There is always work for the tractors of Rosselkhoznadzor.

Choosing an oak bark

With foreign products, Russia is waging a war of destruction, but with foreign medicines tactics are more cunning: the key task of power and business is to create its own pharmaceutical market, absorbing foreign developments. Right now, the country is performed by the Farma-2020 state program. Accepted long before the sanctions war, it, in fact, is the contribution of the Ministry of Industry and Trade to the general concept of replacing foreign drugs with domestic potions. Pharma involved import substitution of drugs at least 90% by 2018.

It was, to put it mildly, an optimistic forecast, says Larisa Popovich, director of the Institute of Health Economics of Health. “Initially, the Pharma-2020 program set a goal not so much to develop innovative drugs (this task is more stretched in time) as to ensure the production of analog medicines. Yes, from the point of view of replacing analogues, we really have succeeded and can release drugs that have already lost patent protection. Another question is that sometimes they are more expensive than the same analogues from Southeast Asia, so the state is forced to introduce preferences to domestic manufacturers and work with the admission or preventing drugs from abroad to the country, ”she says. At the same time, it cannot be denied that 90% of the Ministry of Industry and Trade is rather a desire to replace drugs in domestic in the list of strategically important drugs (this is about 150 items), and there, of course, Russia is in order, the replacement process is almost in accordance with the deadlines, the expert adds.

It will be more correct to say that Pharma-2020 and import substitution are two different and parallel processing processes, says Sergey Shulyak, General Director of DSM Group. “Import substitution in itself has long been developing in the Russian farm. In this case, it is not only the development of production for Russian money, but also the construction of infrastructure at the expense of foreign companies that work on the Russian market. This is not only the release of Russian drugs, but also the localization of drugs that were previously produced abroad, and now they are produced in Russia, ”Shulyak explains. Now preparing to enact the pharmaceutical development program until 2030, where an even more ambitious task has been set - to remove at least partially dependence on foreign substances from which medicines are produced.

This is the same problem as with products: formally, the medicine can be called Russian, but in fact it is a “screwdriver assembly”. “The government, apparently, is very enough what is happening, but I immediately have the question of why they call them domestic drugs that are localized here but are produced by foreign pharmaceutical companies,” the president of the patient's defenders Alexander Saversky is outraged. -I can’t name the Toyota car with all the desire, although it is going to St. Petersburg. And there are a lot of such drugs, if you remove them from the share that refers to the replaced domestic, then there will be less than ten percent. Therefore, to amuse itself that the country is safe and has already replaced something there, it seems to me strange. This is not true. I’m not saying that we had no raw materials until 2014, now it’s some kind of crumbs. ”

Russia is inscribed in the world market of drugs, so such processes are inevitable and - moreover - normal, objects Larisa Popovich. “No country is self -sufficient in terms of the production of all drugs that it may need,” she says. - We, like in all countries, most rare diseases, some of the oncological are treated anyway with drugs that come from around the world. The emergence of an effective tool against a particular ailment is an increasingly rare and very expensive, albeit happy case, and it can only occur in a country with a developed research base. So far we are only restoring our positions in this segment. Nevertheless, we already have our own findings: we began to produce the latest painkillers that are more effective than used in the world. We have new insulins, drugs for the treatment of some dangerous infections, drugs for the diagnosis and treatment of various types of oncology. ” Champion companies produce not only medicines, but, for example, vaccines: Russia provides itself independently, the expert adds, although dependence is maintained in the production of substances for small molecules-primarily from the countries of Southeast Asia.

Alexander Saversky has claims to substitutes for foreign medicines: “Generics are of rather low quality, and everyone doubts their authenticity. Suppose, on the advice of a doctor, I began to take the drug, he says to me: “You just drink a dose twice as much as it is written. For some reason, the substance acts twice weaker. ” Well, if a person knows this, but if not? "

While the Pharma-2020 program has not been inscribed in the context of patriotic import substitution, there were no systemic claims to the industry: it developed on its own. As soon as the politics and the wishes of “drinking the bark of oak” intervened, the pharmaceutical industry became the object of criticism, scandals erupted. Regularly updated government prohibitions on the supply of medications and medical equipment from abroad-albeit an incentive for domestic manufacturers, but this is a very bad doping, experts warn.

“All attempts to localize the production of Bigfarms and restrictions in their activities without partnership with a domestic manufacturer, which made foreign companies go to the localization and transfer of technologies,” all this inhaled life into our industry, ”Larisa Popovich admits that there are several champion companies in Russia, which, for example, make drugs unique for the whole world, including rare or rare or rare or rare or rare or rare or rare or rare or rare or rares oncological diseases. “Another question is that such a doping cannot be carried away for a long time, and for this our science needs to be competitive and get to your feet, and not wait for preferences from the state.”

However, the very idea that a foreign drug can be abandoned if at least two drugs similar in terms of properties are produced in Russia, many seem strange to many.

“Why did you get the idea that we have enough equipment, raw materials and drugs? Where are the calculations? Where is the quality comparison? There is none of this, ”says Alexander Saversky.

- FAS generally has a very strange position: if the medicine is registered according to the indications, it means that it is interchangeable for the one who has the same indications. But even if on paper the formula of the medicine is the same, in reality we use different raw materials, different technologies, a different environment. I'm not talking about concentration and auxiliary substances - what affects the composition of the drug. In cases with some complex diseases, people encounter that one drug helps them, and the other is not, and there are a lot of prosecutorial inspections around this, and court decisions, and deaths. People without the necessary medicines, unfortunately, die. ”

Protection of the interests of Russian pharmaceutical companies is normal, says Sergey Shulyak from the DSM Group, the entire pharmaceutical market is largely built on this: there will be no benefit for the industry, there will be no development. Moreover, you can not be afraid of any monopolization of the market (or even oligopoly), because not even the largest manufacturer of drugs occupies more than 4% of the pharmaceutical market of Russia. But even he admits that the exclamations of the Duma and the Government that Western drugs to spread in Russia need to be prohibited, the industries only harm. “These are sanctions against the citizens themselves,” the defender of the interests of patients Alexander Saversky is categorical. -For some reason, the government does not go to the Zhiguli, but for us it buys these "Zhiguli" in healthcare. "

With the participation of Arnold Khachaturov