Import substitution a year later: achievements and losses

Russia has summed up the first year of the food embargo. As the Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation Alexander Tkachev stated, in 2015 imports of food in Russia, compared to 2014, will decrease by almost half (by 1.6 times) from 41 billion dollars to 25 billion dollars.

According to him, overall measures taken by the Government allowed the Russian agro-industrial complex to maintain growth, which last year amounted to 3.7%, while food production has grown by 3.3%. On results of the work, in the 1st half of 2015 agriculture was the only sector of the economy to maintain steady growth of 2.9%.

On the most import dependent products – cheese – the volume of imports during the year of sanctions (comparing July 2014 to July 2015) decreased by 9.4 times, to 41 tonnes, while the volume of domestic production increased by 22.6%. Deliveries of butter decreased 7.8-fold, to 7.3 thousand tons, skimmed milk powder fell 6.3-fold.

As the deputy head of the Federal Agency for Fisheries Petr Savchuk noted, fishermen are interested in catching those kinds of bioresources that previously were not actively mastered by them. In particular, catches of small herring fish species multiplied during the sanctions year, they are used in the production of canned food - sprats, sardines, anchovies. 4 times more mackerel is produced – the catch increased to 48.8 thousand tons, the capelin catch nearly doubled, to 45.8 thousand tons. Shrimp production inreased by more than a third in the first half of the year to 9 thousand tonnes.

For his part, the head of the National Meat Association drew attention to the fact that the embargo has not affected the potential volume of meat supplies much. Imports decreased by almost half, but not as a result of the embargo, but as a result of the devaluation. "As for beef, on the countries that are under the ban, there is no more than 4% of supplies, respectively, other countries could easily make up for it," he said. Restriction of pork imports happened 6 months prior to the embargo due to animal diseases in Europe.

All these results allowed the Russian Agriculture Ministry to begin reducing the predicted deadlines for the country to reach a level of self-sufficiency with key products that were laid down in the basic document – the Food Security Doctrine, which has been operating since 2010.