Agricultural subsidies to be preserved - President
«Kazakhstan is the world’s 9th country in terms of territory. 75% its lands are suitable for agriculture. 15% or 1.3 million of economically active rural population are employed in agricultural sector which ensures food security of the country. The share of agro-industrial complex in the country's foreign trade is rising. The export of agricultural products has increased by 45% over the past four years. Agricultural enterprises of Kazakhstan export their products to 75 countries of the world. Our objective is to increase the export of processed agricultural products and labor productivity by 2.5 times by 2022. This will require a qualitative new approach to improving the efficiency of agricultural sector itself,» the Head of State said addressing the meeting participants.
Minister of Agriculture Saparkhan Omarov informed that the volume of GDP in agriculture had risen by 3.6% in 8 months of 2019 compared to the same period in 2018.
«According to recent reports, the harvesting area in Kazakhstan this year is 15.2 million hectares. Harvesting campaign on 49% of these lands has already been completed. 8.3 million tons of grain were threshed with an average yield of 11.2 hundreds kilograms per hectare. This year, 14 thousand hectares of lands in North Kazakhstan region were planted with soybean seeds. Next year we plan to seed 150 hectares of fields,» said the Minister.
He also told about the work on rational use of agricultural lands. 12.8mn hectares of idle lands have been revealed as a result of land inventory. The Ministry offers to launch a number of measures to toughen control over the use of agricultural lands, including the introduction of space monitoring and 20-fold increase in land tax basic rate.
Saparkhan Omarov also raised the issue of agriculture subsidizing. In his opinion, the methodology for evaluating the effectiveness of government support measures should be developed; business entities receiving subsidies should be imposed counter-obligations as well as the volume of regional gross agricultural product should be taken into account when calculating subsidies.
The Head of State assured the agricultural producers that the subsidies would be preserved.
«The government will continue providing subsidies. Now we need to determine the sectors which really need subsidies. The objective of the Ministry of Agriculture is to work out the methodology of allocation of subsidies which will benefit the agricultural sector,» the President emphasized.