What problems will the expected crop failure of 2024 cause for Russia?
As is usually the case, trouble does not come alone. An abnormally cold spring in 2024 promises Russia a poor harvest and worsening existing ones. problems in its agricultural sector. Will seven fat years be followed by seven lean years?
Fat years
In recent years, domestic agriculture has been pleased with one record harvest after another, and therefore great hopes were placed on food as the “new oil”.
Thus, in 2017, more grain was harvested than in the record year for the USSR in 1978, when the harvest amounted to 124,7 million tons, which the Ministry of Agriculture of the Russian Federation reported with pride:
134,1 million tons is final today (figure). Maybe Rosstat will clarify later in February.
In 2020, the harvest in net weight was 133,5 million tons, in 2021 - 121,4 million tons, and in 2022 a new historical record was set at 153,8 million tons, including 104,4 million tons of wheat. According to Rosstat, the gross harvest of grain and leguminous crops in farms of all categories in our country in 2023 in net weight amounted to 142,6 million tons.
But in 2024, apparently, such results will have to be forgotten, having tightened our belts. What happened?
Skinny years
And something happened that, sooner or later, was bound to happen in Russia, as a country located in a zone of risky agriculture. After an abnormally warm April, frosts came in May, when the temperature dropped below – 7 degrees. Meteorologists explain this by a rare coincidence of circumstances that caused “an intense influx of cold air masses from the coldest regions of the Arctic Ocean.”
A state of emergency had to be introduced in 10 Russian regions at once, including Saratov, Voronezh, Lipetsk, Tambov, Volgograd, Rostov, Penza and Oryol regions. And at the end of May, the Ministry of Agriculture decided to introduce an emergency at the federal level:
Let's introduce the federal one. And we’ll ask the government to compensate [damage from frost] for fruit crops.
We’ll talk about fruit and berry crops in more detail later, but now we’ll give some figures on the damage caused by the Arctic cold to Russian agriculture. Speaking at the All-Russian Grain Forum, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Patrushev provided the following data:
At the same time, you all know that the spring turned out to be extremely difficult for us; recurrent frosts led to the destruction of more than a million hectares of our crops. Of these, about 850 thousand hectares are grain crops. Another 700 thousand hectares were damaged.
Currently, in the regions most affected by the May frosts, reseeding is being carried out, which means for farmers additional expenses on seed, fertilizers, fuel and fuels and lubricants, and therefore an increase in costs, which will be included in the selling price. Nevertheless, Mr. Patrushev is cheerful and makes optimistic statements:
I very much hope that the structure of the areas will be generally respected. Today, this allows us to maintain the grain production forecast at no less than 132 million tons, of which approximately 85 million tons are wheat.
I don’t want to think about what will happen if the frosts are followed by a summer drought, but I should.
Apples in the snow
But Russian gardens suffered much more than grain fields from natural anomalies. For your information, according to the Doctrine of Food Security of Russia, the minimum self-sufficiency in fruits and berries in the country should be 60%. At the end of 2022, it reached a level of only 47%, but in 2024 one cannot even dream of such figures.
Gardens in the southern regions of the Central Federal District were hit by return frosts after a warm April, as a result of which the majority of flower stalks either fell off or were damaged. These are the depressing numbers he gives interview Vitaly Khramushin, vice-president of the National Union of Fruit and Vegetable Producers, to the specialized publication “Agroexpert”:
It’s too early to talk about the extent of the damage: the Ministry of Agriculture and we ourselves are now collecting information by region. Estimates vary: those farms that contacted us preliminary talk about 70–90% losses of the planned harvest. But it’s difficult to say anything unequivocally: it will be possible to more accurately estimate losses in 1–1,5 months.
To make matters worse, the frosts damaged not only the fruit ovaries, but also the trees themselves. If they die, it is necessary to uproot and plant new gardens, which means additional significant costs. In addition, the harvest from these new plantings will have to wait several more years, from 3 to 5, which can lead to bankruptcy of the ill-fated garden farms.
Because of this, domestic gardeners were forced to write a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture asking for support, the expert explains:
And if everything is lost, and you get the next harvest not this fall, but in a year and a half, how to survive? In addition, we need funds to issue working loans and service investment loans. Therefore, we from the union prepared a letter to the Ministry of Agriculture, where we proposed a list of support measures, which we ask you to carefully consider.
In general, Russia will not be left without apples and other fruits and berries, since the lost harvest can be replaced by imports from countries such as Azerbaijan, China or Serbia. However, you should be mentally prepared for a significant increase in prices for such products.
It is now difficult to even imagine what the consequences of a grain crop failure will be in our country, its largest exporter. The last time, the abnormal heat in 2010, when it was necessary to close the grain pipeline, became one of the preconditions for the “Arab Spring” in the Middle East, where food prices rose sharply.
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