Abstract:
The Russians faced several problems related to the food industry, following the introduction of sanctions by the West in 2014. One of the issues is a significant increase in the cost of the consumer basket, because of the devaluation of the ruble and the inflation shock. Another problem is the deterioration of the quality of food products, which is hard to solve because of the imposed embargo on the import of Western products. As a result of the sanctions introduced by Russia, the import of food products reduced, which was partially compensated by the production of domestic agricultural products. This caused a significant increase in crop production, which rose by 42% from 2014 to 2016. Thus, in 2016, Russia became the top country in wheat exports. The livestock production also raised by 17% from 2014 to 2016. Recently, there has been an increase in investment activity in the Russian agro-industrial sector. The volume of investments in fixed assets increased by 16% from 2014 to 2016. As a result of the analysis of financing sources, the share of the own funds of enterprises has been growing (from 53% in 2014 to 60% by 2016), while the share of attracted resources has been decreased. Despite the positive trends, it is necessary to focus on the concept of rational import substitution, which will not cause damage to either consumers or competitiveness of Russian companies in the world market. It is also necessary to develop interaction between agrarian sector and science in order to solve the problems of innovation development. Proper monitoring will allow achieving the declared results of import substitution policy. As part of the work, we proposed an index that takes into account not only the ongoing process of substitution of imported goods by national ones, but also consider how change in prices influences domestic products, as well as the investment component.
