Russia's Agriculture Ministry plans to establish three agro bio-techno parks in Russia - minister
MOSCOW. April 14 (Interfax) - Russia's Agriculture Ministry has planned to establish three agro bio-techno parks domestically, Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut said on Monday during an interview with Rossiya 24 TV.
"The program [Technological Support for Food Security] envisages establishing three agro bio-techno parks, with one already established in the Belgorod Region in the areas of biotechnology and enzymes. The second one was selected last year, and this is the area of plant breeding in Adygea, jointly financed by the government and business. Businesses have spent about 450 million rubles to establish the bio-techno park. We expect it to be commissioned in November of this year," Lut said.
Lut said that the Krasnodar Region has a very solid scientific cluster, thus it has been chosen as the region for the project.
"All the key scientific institutes, still Soviet, that are engaged in plant breeding are located there. There is also a particular climate zone there," she said.
"The EFKO company is the driver, which should begin construction on the enzyme production plant soon, where we hope to receive [products] by 2027," Lut said regarding developing feed additives production.
"We currently do not have enzyme production in general, and we import nearly everything. Therefore, the task of import substitution is here. However, our scientific institutes have also developed the strains that are to be used in production, which is very important and valuable," she said.
The industry is becoming more technologically advanced, Lut said.
"There is more agricultural machinery operating on autopilot each year. We are discussing with one of the major manufacturers of civilian UAVs the topic of the drone itself taking material from the damaged area and doing a PCR analysis, so that the agronomist could obtain information online about what kind of disease it is or what processes are going on in the vegetation of plants, and then render prompt decisions. This is not the case yet; we really want it, because just monitoring is not enough for us," she said.
Labor productivity in the industry has jumped 55% overall in the past 10 years, Lut said.
