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The Russian agro-industrial complex was able to build work in the new conditions and reorient itself, there is no panic in the industry, TASS reported with reference to Deputy Minister of Agriculture Elena Fastova. In her opinion, agricultural producers are the most optimistic of all industries.

“The agribusiness sector very quickly found how and what to replace, and focused as much as possible not on coming and saying that everything is bad, but on requests for targeted support. And we helped them as much as possible, did not interfere, and they themselves did a lot and reoriented their production,” said the Deputy Minister. In particular, according to Fastova, some manufacturers have already switched from imported equipment to Russian counterparts.

The deputy minister added that the agricultural sector will be able to attract an additional 60 billion rubles. preferential loans due to the reduction of the key rate of the Central Bank from 20% to 17% per annum. “When the Central Bank announced the rate at 17%, we immediately recalculated. And we understand that with this money, which the president has already announced to us, and which is allocated to us until the end of the year, we will be able to issue more loans," TASS quotes Fastova. - Just yesterday we were gathering banks and our regions and said that on Monday we would review the limits for them, because if we calculated the limits based on a rate of 20%, then they could receive about 300 billion rubles, and now we understand that it will not be 300 billion, but 360 billion rubles.”

Earlier, the government allocated 26 billion rubles. for concessional lending to systemically important enterprises of the industry. In Russia, there are now 122 such companies, and taking into account dependent and subsidiaries, the number of backbone enterprises is about 2 thousand. To date, the Ministry of Agriculture has approved half of their loans for a total of 12.3 billion rubles, Fastova said.

She also noted that the amount of financing of a part of the direct costs incurred for the construction and modernization of agricultural facilities (CAPEX) is 8.3 billion rubles. Fastova stressed that the Ministry of Agriculture does not plan to completely abandon this measure of state support, although such plans were previously announced. However, the reimbursement of capital expenditures stimulates the industry well, thanks to this measure, it was possible to develop the greenhouse sector and almost provide ourselves with cucumbers and tomatoes, Fastova drew attention. “We said back in that year that we were extending this type of support, and if before that the Ministry of Finance was categorically against it, now we have a dialogue. We left all these types of support for this year,” the Deputy Minister added.

Meanwhile, according to the head of the Federal Agency for Fisheries, Ilya Shestakov, the sanctions did not have a noticeable negative impact on the work of the Russian fishery industry. He said this at a meeting of the government commission on the development of the fishery complex chaired by Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko, the press service of the department reports. As of April 11, 2022, the volume of catch of aquatic biological resources by Russian companies amounted to 1.45 million tons, which is 1.3% higher than the same period last year. According to the agency, fishing is going on as usual, 463 Russian vessels are involved in it.