Will kolkhoz workers receive 1 million rubles?

The rural revival programme worth several billions failed to offer more jobs in villages and increase the wages in agricultural sector to the planned level.

“Zavtra Tvoei Strany” tries to find out whether it was right to focus on agriculture in the past five years.

The rural revival programme, which ends this year, has become the major project of the last five years. It was planned to invest almost 70 trillion rubles in prices of 2005 which was supposed to increase production volumes thus raising wages in the agricultural sector.

In accordance with the rural revival programme, the average wage in agriculture was to reach $320-360, or some 1 million rubles, by the end of 2010. Agricultural workers earned only 799,845 rubles in May. So, there must be a 25% hike to hit the target.

Despite all attempts of attracting people to rural areas by building agricultural towns and moving the unemployed from towns to villages the number of agricultural workers fell. Statistics says the number was 438,400 people in 2009 that is 25,000 people less than in 2004.

The number of workers may be enough, but labour must be more effective. Agriculture’s share in the country’s GDP has decreased from 8.3% to 7.8% since 2004, though more than 9% of Belarusian working population is engaged in farming.

The agricultural sector attracts 18.2% of the whole volume of fixed investment. Just to compare, transport and communication together have only 8.6% of the overall volume of investments.

Involving only 7.6% of the employed population, transport and communication has a share of 9% in the country’s GDP. Besides, communication and transport services to the population cost more than housing and public utility services, and the transport sector is the most export-oriented among service industries. The volume of transport services exports can be compared with the volume of food production export.

It is an interesting question how the village looked like today if it had been decided five years ago to invest money not in the rural industry but in transport and communication. In this case it wasn’t necessary to revive rural area as villages were engaged in motorway service and traded via the Internet.