AFP, Moscow :
Russia’s farm sector needs an additional 636 billion rubles ($17.6 billion, 13.2 billion euros) of investment to replace the products it banned in response to Western sanctions, Agriculture Minister Nikolai Fyodorov said Friday.
“We prepared a reasonably optimistic scenario of the sector’s development that foresees additional financing of not one trillion, but just 636 billion rubles from 2015 through 2020,” the minister was quoted as saying by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency.
Russia earlier this month imposed sweeping bans on food from the United States, the European Union and a handful of other countries in response to Western economic sanctions.
The trade war is part of a broader crisis in East-West relations sparked by Russia’s perceived attempts to split strife-torn Ukraine in two after Kiev’s decision to seek a closer political and economic alliance with Europe.
Officials expressed confidence at the time that Russia would be able to make up for the shortfall with imports from Latin American and other allied countries as well as additional investments in its own agricultural sector.
