The Ministry of Agriculture does not yet plan new purchases of grain for the intervention fund

The Ministry of Agriculture is not yet planning additional purchases of grain for the intervention fund this year, Russian Minister of Agriculture Dmitry Patrushev told reporters.

“There will be no increase, 3 (million tons) purchased is enough. Let’s see what will happen, we do not plan yet, ”he said (quote according to TASS).

At the end of February, Deputy Head of the Ministry of Agriculture Oksana Lut, in a letter to the President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation (CCI RF), Sergey Katyrin, said that the department was considering the possibility of additional purchases of grain to the state fund in 2023. At the same time, at the beginning of the same month, she, on the contrary, stated that the ministry was not planning intervention, wrote “Vedomosti”.

March 26, Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko toldthat the government is considering purchasing an additional 7 million tons of grain for the intervention fund.

The mechanism of purchases and interventions has been operating in Russia since 2001. When the price of grain on the market decreases, the state buys it into the fund, thereby removing the surplus from the market and keeping it from falling excessively. With a sharp increase in the cost of grain for processors, a decision is made on commodity interventions, and due to saturation, the price stabilizes.

According to the National Commodity Exchange, in 2022, the intervention fund purchased 3.1 million tons of grain for 47 billion rubles. The total annual consumption of food wheat and rye by the population of Russia is 10.5 million tons. The grain harvest in the country in the 2022-2023 season, according to Rosstat, amounted to 153.8 million tons.