Working meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich

Today, in Moscow, Governor Alexey Ostrovskiy had a working meeting with Arkady Dvorkovich, Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.

The parties discussed the key issues of the state support for the flax industry development and withdrawal of unclaimed agricultural land.

In 2012,Smolensk region was one of the first in the Russian Federation to have a long-term regional target program "Flax industry development in the Smolensk region" for 2012-2014, the main aim of which is technical modernization of the flax industry, developed and launched.

As part of the program, modern flax harvesting equipment was acquired for the sum of 212 million Rubles, which allowed to improve the efficiency of growing and harvesting flax, without using hard manual labor. In 2014, in the Vyazma district, a new flax processing plant, equipped with the Russian-Belgian machinery to produce monofilaments and having processing capacity of 4,000 tons of raw flax per year, was launched.

As a result of the work aimed at the development of the flax industry, there has been some positive production growth. Thus, in 2014, the average increase of flax yield to the level of 2012 was 52%, the increase in flax product sales was 83%.

The growth of the performance figures testifies for the effectiveness of the flax production in the Smolensk region, which is largely due to the present level of the state support from the federal and regional budgets.