The Ministry of Agriculture is not going to revise the final forecast for the grain harvest in 2024, although the final value is much lower than planned.
As noted by the Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation Oksana Lut, in the current season, farmers managed to show decent results, and the harvest will most likely enter the top 5 in recent years.
At the same time, it was initially planned that about 150 million tons of grain would be collected, but due to weather conditions, they had to face a significant decrease of about 20-22 million tons.
In particular, the factors that farmers had to deal with were late spring frosts, summer drought and autumn rains, which interfered with the harvest.
In addition, due to the geopolitical situation, it was not possible to collect part of the harvest in the Kursk, Bryansk and Belgorod regions, the shortfall there could have amounted to 1.5 million tons, the minister noted.
«Despite all the difficulties, the results this year will be more than worthy — the harvest will be among the top five in the history of the country.
Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev said that about 130 million tons of grain would be harvested. This figure will not be revised until the end of the year.
In general, grain was sown in the country with the expectation of a harvest of 150 million tons, and if not for the climatic anomalies, then, of course, more would have been harvested than we are currently predicting,» she said.
With all that, despite the fact that the year was obviously difficult for farmers, everything possible was done to overcome the negative consequences. For example, after part of the crops perished due to frost, about 900 thousand hectares were quickly resown.
This made it possible to prevent a critical decline in production levels and protect, first of all, the country’s food security.
As for natural force majeure, it is obvious that they will happen in the future.
According to Oksana Lut, insurance can be an effective means of protection against them. Moreover, the responsibility for insuring their harvest lies primarily with the enterprises themselves.
Those that took care of this in time, in the end, suffered much less than others, because insurance payments with state support this season totaled about 2.6 billion rubles, and by the end of the season this amount may still grow to 5.5 billion.
The government also allocated 930 million rubles to help gardening farms affected by frost.
At the same time, difficulties are already looming in the new season. For example, the state of winter crops is now a concern, since they are much worse developed over a large area than in other years on the same date.
