Role of Agricultural Import Substitution Policy in Ensuring Food Safety of the Country

Abstract

Introduction In terms of political and economic non-stability there is a critical issue related to pursuing efficient import substitution policy in the national economy of the Russian Federation for the purpose of providing economic safety of the country as a whole and its regions in particular. Over the recent 4 years serious steps have been made in this aspect. A new version of the State Program of Agriculture Development and Regulation of Markets of Agricultural Products, Raw Materials and Food for 2013-2020 (hereinafter related to as the State Program), Doctrine of Food Safety of the Russian Federation (approved by Order of the President of the Russian Federation No. 120 dated January 30, 2010), Strategy of the Development of Food and Processing Industry of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2020 (approved by Order of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 559-p dated April 17, 2012), Concept of Stable Development of Rural Territories of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2020 (approved by Order of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 2136-p dated November, 30, 2010), Concept of Stable Development of Rural Territories of the Russian Federation for the Period up to 2030 (approved by Order of the Government of the Russian Federation No. 151-p dated February, 2, 2015), as well as other federal and departmental target programs related to solving problems on developing the agro-industrial complex of the country and providing its food safety have been adopted (On Approving Food Safety Doctrine of the Russian Federation; On Approving the Plan of Events ("Road Map") on Contributing to Import Substitution in Agriculture for 2014-2015). Methods In spite of the fact that economic literature has got works on problems related to import substitution, theoretical and methodological and scientific and practical researches are mainly fragmentary. The passivity of national researchers in developing import substitution problems is explained by many reasons: possibility to overcome the deficit of national goods with the aid of import; stereotype of opinions, often unstipulated, about a higher quality of imported products; and smoothly running system of marketing of products and logistics related to receiving goods on the global market (Economist Intelligence Unit: Rating of the World Countries According to the Level of Food Safety in 2014). Along with this, the import domination is accompanied with numerous risks for the country, including the use of import dependence for political purposes by our Western partners (for example, introduction of long-term sanctions). The world practice shows that this is import substitution that is an efficient tool to optimize import. For the first time in history researchers started to develop the basic principles of import substitution strategy during the Great Depression (in the 1930s) when Latin American and other countries were looking for ways to withdraw from stagnation and obtain economic growth. Such policy was called "import substituting industrialization". The Argentinean economist R. Prebisch (who published his theory in 1950), and the Sweden economist G. Murdal (1957) insisted on changing the structural policy within the national economy and became known as "structuralists" (Bruton 1989). These researchers insisted on applying the policy of protectionism in relation to own heavy industry and national economy, as well as on protecting promising areas and universal state regulation. According to structuralists, the protection of national industry is urgent for developing countries, and the industry must become more stable and mature under the state protection (Bruton, 1988; Robbins, 2013; Kormishkina and Semenova, 2016). Herewith, it is assumed to use both monetary and fiscal methods of state regulation within the protecting policy (Edwards, 1993). According to this theory, the essence of the import substitution policy is as follows: the state acquires control over the key enterprises of the production and processing industry, and then provides these enterprises with various privileges for the purpose of producing goods locally and being analogous to the imported ones. …