The Ministry of Agriculture has developed new measures to curb the rise in prices for butter and sugar The department spoke about the need to create a special intervention fund for the purchase of sugar in 2022-2023, writes Forbes. The fund will allow the product to be sold at lower prices during periods of sharp price increases. In addition, the Ministry of Finance is considering increasing the export duty on sunflower oil.
Among the measures to combat price increases, they also named incentives for sugar suppliers to Russia in 2022 and the expansion of sunflower production. The Ministry of Agriculture developed new proposals to curb the rise in prices for products after the instructions of Deputy Prime Minister Victoria Abramchenko. Now the department is preparing to submit them to the government.
The export duty on sunflower oil in Russia began to operate on September 1. Its validity period will expire at the end of August 2022. The fee is “floating” – 70 percent of the difference between the base price ($ 1,000 per tonne) and the indicative price (average market price per month) less $ 50 per tonne.
The problem arose back in the pandemic year 2020. After the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin that the rise in prices for basic products cannot be explained by a pandemic, the government ordered producers and retail chains to freeze prices for sugar and butter. The price adjustment for sugar ended on June 1, 2021, and for butter, on October 1. However, in the spring, the head of the Bank of Russia Elvira Nabiullina advised to abandon the administrative price cap due to artificial distortion of price indicators and harm to the development of production.
At the same time, in November Nabiullina said that food inflation in the country had already reached double-digit values … Rosstat reported that in October the figure for the first time in five years reached 8.13 percent. Prices for sugar in annual terms increased even more – by 11.32 percent, and for vegetable oil – by 16.31 percent.