Russia is the largest country in the world. It is well endowed with arable land, with close to the per capita availability of the United States and the twice that of Ukraine. These lands are more or less suitable for agriculture and have to produce 98% of the population nutrition requirements.
Today in Russia agriculture remains an important sector much more so than in other developed nations.
Some 38 percent of the Russian populations live in rural areas. More than 15 percent of the work is employed in agricultural occupations.
Despite low productive and insufficient restructuring, large scale agriculture is expected to remain important, especially because the political forces in Russia clearly favor a future agriculture based on large scale entities.
Farm enterprise is very large with many of them controlling between 4000 and 8000 hectares of land. Large farming enterprises dominate farm structure with about 83% of agricultural land in Russian.
While individual private farms represent a second category and they operate in about 7% of agricultural land.
Russia projected to be among the world’s largest wheat exporter in 2013. The country expected to harvest 54 million tones and to export 17 million tons of neat in the 2013-2014 seasons, ranking behind the US, Canada and the European Union.
Agriculture in Russia
