Kazakhstan Agriculture Minister suggests changing from subsidies to vehicles leasing

Kazakhstan Agriculture Minister Assylzhan Mamytbekov is suggesting to transfer the government subsidies to vehicles leasing, Tengrinews.kz reports. “It is best to harvest the grain within 20 days. And every 10 days of delay may cause up to 10 percent of losses. Please calculate how much people lost because of insufficient number vehicles. The subsidies they get (500 tenge ($3) per 1 hectare) are credulously small. In 10 days they will lose more than these 500 tenge. The question is why giving those 500 tenge? Let’s better make a program to make leasing of vehicles more affordable. Sowing and harvesting will then be made in time. These 500 tenge make a total of 20 billion tenge ($135 million) country-wide,” Agricultural Minister said. According to the Minister, besides vehicles leasing, these money can be used for stabilization of prices and creation of a guaranteed loans fund. He noted that most of the farmers got their agricultural vehicles during privatization of the farms and they are worn out. Many sowing complexes and equipment do not comply with current technologies. “We have only 2.5 thousand anchor and disc planters. If multiplied by the average capacity of every sowing vehicle, 2,000 hectares per season, we can say that we can only sow 5 million hectares with good modern equipment. There is not enough equipment, even the bad one. That’s why our sowing season gets delayed and nobody meets the optimal period for sowing. If we had enough harvesting equipment, we wouldn’t be harvesting until November, when it starts snowing,” Assylzhan Mamytbekov said. By Aidana Ussupova