“According to the preliminary evaluations, the agricultural machinery market grew by 14.8% in 2010, which is a good rate,” Viktor Zubkov said opening  the meeting. “At the same time,” he continued, “the structure of growth was imbalanced. The demand for foreign equipment increased significantly – by 57.4% – while that for Russian equipment fell by 5.5%.” The first deputy prime minister pointed out that the root cause for this imbalance was the inefficient use of funds allocated for the  technical modernisation of agriculture under the state programme to develop agriculture. “In 2010, only 46% of subsidies from the federal budget, or 0.99 billion roubles out of 2.1 billion, were used for loans to purchase Russian agricultural equipment,” Mr Zubkov said. “Manufacturers of agricultural machinery expect the demand for  Russian equipment to rise by more than 7.5% this year. In this respect, we need to ensure that the related targeted subsidies are used up in 2011,” the first deputy prime minister emphasised.

Officials at the meeting discussed the need to improve the work of machine testing stations. The working group members agreed that “the  results of the state testing system’s work are in demand with the country’s agricultural machine engineering.” Mr Zubkov emphasised the need to modernise machine testing stations, to devise methods and criteria to enhance their efficiency and to ensure that the results of their work are accessible to agricultural businesses. The deputy prime minister added that the stations’ work should be in line with the efforts of government institutions for the development of agriculture, namely Rosselkhozbank and the agro-industrial leasing company Rosagroleasing.

Viktor Zubkov instructed related government agencies to draft comprehensive plans to reequip machine testing stations and to set up a system to publish test results.