For 20 years, Russian agricultural sector has turned from a lagging industry into highly profitable and investment-attractive businesses, whose products now not only provide the country, but also already bring the country more profit than the military-industrial complex for export. Throughout this time, support for agriculture was provided by a specialized financial institution – Russian Agricultural Bank (the Bank, RusAg), which celebrated its anniversary in June.
The main achievements of the Russian agribusiness are evident. Over five years of an active import substitution policy, the self-sufficiency targets for key products established by the Food Security Doctrine (grain and legumes, vegetable oil, sugar, meat and meat products) have been achieved or even exceeded. Food imports fell from USD 43.3 billion in 2013 to USD 29.8 billion in 2018, which is more than 30%. An example of sugar is indicative: if at the turn of the 21st century only about a third of sugar was produced from Russian beets, then since 2017, foreign raw materials are not used. At the same time, the implementation of the national project to increase the export of agricultural products to USD 45 billion a year by 2024 is successfully progressing. Compared to 2000, the export of agricultural products from Russia has increased almost 20 times.
For almost two decades, agribusiness profit has grown from RUB 11.8 billion to RUB 160.3 billion, or almost 14 times. In the processing industry, a similar indicator increased from RUB 76.6 billion to RUB 403.3 billion – more than 5 times. Revenue in both sectors showed an increase of 4.5 times.
Russian Agricultural Bank actively participated in promoting the success of the agricultural sector. Since 2006, RusAg has been a key participant in the national project "Development of agribusiness", with the assistance of the Bank about 4.2 thousand agricultural investment projects have been commissioned. Since the start of the State program on agribusiness development in 2008, the Bank has allocated over RUB 8.6 trillion to support the industry. RusAg clients have become significant players in all agribusiness sub-sectors. By the beginning of 2020, 25% of the total export volume was accounted for by the Bank's clients. Since 2014, the Bank has actively replaced funds raised in foreign capital markets with funds raised in the domestic market. The volume of customer funds raised by the Bank since the beginning of 2014 increased from RUB 696 billion to more than RUB 2.4 trillion.