What can the state do to save its people

Each lesson began with a demonstration of a graph of the population or some part of it in Russia and other countries at different periods of their history, after which he discussed with the audience what factors determined the direction and pace of the dynamics of this indicator, affecting mortality, birth rate and other demographic indicators . We divided these factors into external, independent of the decisions of leaders (changes in natural conditions, natural disasters, mass epidemics, external aggression), and internal, depending on their decisions, including those taken in response to external factors, based on their public duties. and not always public political priorities.

Thirty years have passed, and again it seems important to me. According to the Constitution, “The Russian Federation is a social state whose policy is aimed at creating conditions that ensure a decent life and free development of a person.” How successfully our state creates such conditions can be assessed in different ways.

History teaches that where such conditions are created, the population grows. In the world, its number has grown by almost one and a half times in thirty years, and there are slightly more men than women. What do we have? In Russia, in 1993, the population was 148.6 million people, in 2022 – 146.4 million, among which there are almost ten million more women than men. Thus, in the territory within the boundaries of the beginning of 2014, the population decreased by 4.7 million people.

Demographic statistics explains this by a significant excess of deaths over births (minus 18 million), not fully compensated by the influx of migrants (plus 14 million). And in the latest Russian Statistical Yearbook-2022 (it can be found on the website of Rosstat), you can see that from 2018 to 2021, the death rate of those who have reached the previous retirement age has increased by almost one and a half times, and of the working-age population by a quarter.

It’s easy to chalk it up to a pandemic. Covid is certainly a very important, but far from the only reason for the two million reduction in the number of old-age pensioners over the past four years. Small pensions and problems in the organization of medical care clearly affected.

And you will also learn from the same Rosstat data that 1.55% of the Russian population is undernourished. These data are one of the results of a selective observation of the diets of the population, which was first conducted by Rosstat in 2018 and should be repeated this year and then every five years according to the methodology of the World Food Organization. Behind these small percentages are more than 1.3 million females and 930,000 males. I do not want to call them women and men, because among them, alas, there are many children of both sexes. This is evidenced by other indicators from the same Rosstat data: among children under the age of five, 3.1% had wasting, and 10.6% had stunted growth. In my opinion, ignoring these facts is not only immoral, but also extremely irrational: the various losses of the state and society due to the underdevelopment of such children in the future will many times exceed its costs, which would provide them with good nutrition in the present.

It is clear that our malnourished fellow citizens are among the poorest. Statistics, alas, does not observe the poorest, it covers much larger groups of people, differing in per capita income, each of which covers ten percent of the population. They are called deciles and are numbered starting from the poorest. According to my calculations, based on Rosstat data for 2021, those who belong to the first decile consumed an average of 1.4 kilograms of food of the ten main types recorded by Rosstat daily (bread, potatoes, vegetables, fruits, meat, dairy, eggs, fish, sugar and confectionery, vegetable fats), the cost of which in the cheapest version was 125 rubles per person. The international poverty line is $1.9 per person per day, and Rosstat claims that we have no citizens living on less than that, but I’m not sure about that.

How to assess the nutrition of those who were in this first decile, from a medical point of view? In terms of the number of individual products, they eat 1.5-2.5 times less than the rational consumption norms recommended by the Ministry of Health for all basic products except sugar, and in terms of their total weight – 70% less than recommended. And if these are the average nutritional indicators of almost 15 million Russian citizens from this decile, then what are they like for the poorest, the sixth part of it, whose malnutrition is recorded by statistics?

Do not think that this is something new for our country or unique to the world. And thirty, and twenty, and ten years ago, our sociologists recorded in surveys about the same proportion of answers “I constantly or often feel hungry.” In other developed countries, including much richer ones, there are approximately the same proportions of those who, for various reasons, including having many children, are not able to provide themselves and their children with a well-fed life. But there, these people are not allowed to starve, they are supported by state programs of budgetary subsidies for the purchase of food (in the United States, such a program helps 45 million citizens – one in five) and private food charity programs.

In my memory, we have been discussing this for at least a quarter of a century, but that’s just without result. When in 2016 the Ministry of Industry and Trade proposed such a state program, logically linking subsidies to the purchase of only domestic products, and the government supported it, I believed that things would get off the ground. Alas, it did not move: the Ministry of Finance did not find the budgetary funds necessary for this, even the most modest ones, which would allow working out the technology and organization of such assistance. Meanwhile, according to the calculations of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a ruble of budgetary funds invested in this program would increase GDP by about two rubles. Moreover, its administration – the Achilles’ heel of such programs – would require minimal costs, since it would be possible to give the right to receive such subsidies to those who receive housing subsidies and unemployment benefits – this is up to 10 million people, or 6-7 percent of the population.

In addition to financial support for those in need, natural food assistance is widely practiced in many countries. These are charity canteens, and “field kitchens” for the homeless, and the distribution (or sale for a nominal fee of 1 euro, as in Germany) of products with an expiration date approaching. All this is widely practiced in European countries and not only helps consumers in need, but also allows sellers and manufacturers to save on the disposal of products that do not have the prospect of timely sale, and reduces the burden of such disposal on the environment.

The volume of food losses in our country is estimated at 1.6 million tons. The judicious use of this amount of good quality food would significantly improve the nutrition of the poorest. So what’s stopping you from doing it? It turns out that it is cheaper for companies to pay for the destruction of food than to donate it for free to charity: in this case, they would have to pay VAT to the budget on the amount that they, according to the tax authorities, would gain by selling these products at the market price.

It would seem difficult not to see the absurdity of such a situation. One of the unpleasant consequences of this absurdity is the flow of fictitiously disposed of goods to the markets, through which considerable quantities of expired products are sold “for cheap”. Another is environmental pollution as a result of their actual disposal. So it is always better to use food for its intended purpose than to send it to the disposal.

Quite recently, deputies submitted to the Duma a draft law on the abolition of VAT on the transfer of products to charitable organizations for distribution to those in need. I really hope that his fate will be more successful than previous attempts. But I don’t really believe in it.

In conclusion, let me return to the Russian Statistical Yearbook 2022. In its international comparisons section, one can see that the life expectancy of a child born in 2021 in Russia is 70.06 years. Of the CIS countries, it is lower only in Moldova (69 years), among the BRICS countries – in South Africa (64.4) and India (69.9); in China it is 77.9, in Brazil it is 77 years. The same number is in the USA, in Turkey – 78.6, and in the countries of “old” Europe, as well as Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea – significantly over 80.

Why is this practically not being discussed now, either in power or in society? Isn’t the saving of the people, in the words of AI Solzhenitsyn, the main goal of power and the main indicator of its effectiveness? And shouldn’t all other goals that it sets itself and proposes to us be related to this one?