Permafrost will be warmed with money for vegetables

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited Yakutsk on Monday during his trip to the Far East, where he got acquainted with the regional portfolio of investment projects as part of the White House’s work to improve the investment environment. The government is preparing to expand support for the agro-industrial complex in the Far East by increasing the cost compensation for the creation of complexes for the production of agricultural products, which now account for 20% of capital investments, and extending it to other projects, in addition to greenhouse complexes – the Ministry for the Development of the Far East and the Ministry of Agriculture will present elaborate proposals to the prime minister. The head of government also got acquainted with the digitalization of the region, both at the state level and as part of private initiatives.

The working visit of Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to Yakutia was devoted to the discussion of issues common to the Far Eastern Federal District (FEFD) – in addition to forest fires, this is the food situation in the macro-region as a whole. Thus, a visit to the greenhouse complex in Yakutsk, which allows growing vegetables, herbs and berries all year round in permafrost conditions, was the reason for discussing measures to support the Far Eastern agro-industrial complex. Mikhail Mishustin, assuring that he sees how prices for agricultural products are rising from central Russia to the Far East, asked to “inform” the center if the government “can do something to help”.

The proposals did not have to wait long – the head of the Ministry for the Development of the Far East, Alexei Chekunkov, said that his department, together with the Ministry of Agriculture, was preparing a “systemic solution” and, as soon as it was ready, would present it to the prime minister. In general terms, the minister outlined the essence of the initiative: since the creation of complexes for the production of agricultural products in the Far Eastern Federal District is much more expensive due to the peculiarities of logistics and climate, it is proposed to expand the mechanism for compensating the costs of their investors.

From the end of 2020, such compensations are provided for greenhouse complexes and amount to 20% of capital investments in the project. As Mr. Chekunkov explained to Kommersant, it is advisable to “extend this support measure also to feed production, vegetable stores, possibly dairy farms, poultry farms, livestock complexes” and increase compensation in excess of 20% of investments.

“With compensation for construction costs, enterprises can be profitable, which will increase self-sufficiency within the district, balance prices,” the minister explained.

The prime minister also visited the IT Park Yakutsk high-tech park (it houses the headquarters of the digital transformation of the republic) – its residents presented projects ranging from entertaining games for smartphones to IT initiatives in the field of healthcare. And if the former raised questions from Mikhail Mishustin, rather, from the point of view of content, then the latter are already interested from an applied point of view – the Ministry of Health will study them, including in terms of the possibility of scaling. So, one of the projects is the processing of CT scans of the brain for signs of strokes, as well as CT scans of the chest to detect signs of pneumonia against the background of covid, the second is online medical examination.

In addition to private initiatives, the prime minister was also presented with regional results of the digitalization of public services – recall, the federal center expects to transfer all public services to electronic form by the end of 2023. In Yakutia, according to the Minister of Innovation and Digital Development of the Republic, Anatoly Semenov, 188 services have been digitized, and the most popular is obtaining permits for the extraction of hunting resources, which are distributed by lottery.

“As Bayanai, our god of hunting, gave, so we distribute,” Mr. Semyonov explained, leaving the seriousness behind.

However, in the list of digitized services, the prime minister was more interested in providing payments to victims of emergencies – apparently due to the presidential order to simplify their procedure: “And how much faster was it than before?” According to Anatoly Semyonov, now payments are made in two weeks instead of six months.

As the republican minister lamented, for the full digitalization of Yakutia, it is necessary to solve communication problems – against this background, the authorities of the republic turned to the prime minister with a request for federal co-financing of half of the costs of connecting to high-speed Internet in the Arctic regions (about 11.2 billion rubles in total). Mikhail Mishustin has not yet promised such support, but he assured that he would ask the Ministry of Digital Development to carefully consider all proposals.

Evgenia Kryuchkova, Yakutsk