Figure Of Day: How Much Money Lukashenka “Drowned” In Collective Farms

Many collective farms have been unprofitable all the years of the dictator's rule.

In Shklou district, the dictator again reminded of unprofitable farms. According to him, there are 20-25% of “weak farms” in the country today, which are not essential for the production plan.

According to the data from the National Statistical Committee for January 2019, 13.7% of agricultural organizations with state support and 55.9% organizations without such support were unprofitable, Salidarnasts writes.

The scandal on the farm in Slizhy, as well as the aforementioned statistics, makes us recall how much the state has been investing in agriculture for years. Let us quote the January article of economist Leanid Zlotnikau in Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta newspaper:

– About $ 50 billion has been invested in the development of agriculture over the past 20 years –more than in any other sector of the national economy. But many agricultural enterprises have been chronically unprofitable almost all the years of Belarus’s independence.

All these years they continue to exist thanks to the writing off debts: they are “written off” by inflation (over the years of independence, prices in Belarus have increased a billion times!), to sponsorship of enterprises of other industries and organizations, and their transfer to other economic entities.

For example, in 2017–2018 the debts of the agro-industrial complex to $ 1 billion were transferred to local government budgets.