MINSK, 30 August (BelTA) - Belarus will have enough in its reserves at the end of the harvest campaign to meet the food needs of both people and livestock, Belarus' Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Subbotin said in an interview on a YouTube channel, BelTA has learned.
He stressed that due to the introduced ban on Belarusian grain exports some people started exaggerating that there would not be enough grain in the country. In this regard, he noted that everyone is comparing the current harvest with the last year's one which was a record-high for the country. “If we compare it with 2016 or 2017, we will see that we have a considerable gain. As far as grain is concerned, we estimate that the shortage of fodder grain [for poultry and livestock needs] will be about 800,000-850,000 tonnes.
“The shortage is not a collapse,” he said. It just means that the country's reserves will not be at their full capacity.
The deputy prime minister said that the country still had 560,000 tonnes of grain of the previous year's harvest. “We still have oil cake and meal pellets. We will not go hungry and our animals will not starve,” stressed Aleksandr Subbotin.
As for a ban on the export of some crops, the deputy prime minister said that Belarus seeks not to violate any agreement at the international level. “This is also a red line for us. We are part of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Union State. Therefore, we clearly monitor how stay stick to the rules. That is why the ban is imposed for up to six months,” the deputy prime minister stressed.
According to him, primarily for objective reasons and the yields many are now trying to buy grain from farmers at the current moment of the lowest prices and quickly sell it abroad. “We have had to take this step to even this out, to keep the maximum amount of grain within the country,” Aleksandr Subbotin explained.
He added that the Belarusian National Biotechnology Corporation is launching production facilities in the country. These are huge modern enterprises, which need a large supply of raw materials, such as grain. That is why the domestic harvest is even more in demand in Belarus.
