Leonid Zayats: We used to sponsor foreign countries' economies, but now we assimilated domestic production

We produce what we used to buy yesterday outside Belarus. We sponsored the economy of foreign countries, and now we have learned to do it ourselves. Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus Leonid Zayats told about it in an exclusive interview to our channel.

The corn harvesting is planned to be finished till November 10. In 2022, the area under crops has been expanded by 73 thousand hectares. We want to get what we've been buying outside our state this year. We need it for poultry production, we need it for pork production. 

Grain harvesting was also successful in all the farms.

Leonid Zayats, Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus: 

“We have harvested 10 million 300 thousand tons of grain, 1.5 million tons more against the same period last year. We still have 67,000 hectares of corn to thresh. It will allow us to fully meet the needs of our state with food grain and forage, to provide seeds for the future sowing campaign and load our processing enterprises with the necessary raw materials.

As for the other crops, Belarus has good indices for potatoes: 130 thousand tons against the level of the last year. The yield went up by 32 centners.  "We have expanded the planted acreage this year. This product is important for the domestic market and for export," he said.

The sown areas under the sugar beet increased as well. "We will increase the gross harvest by 350 thousand more by the same indicators of 2021. We see that weather conditions had a serious negative impact on the formation of sugar beet.  We forecast that we will produce about 600-605 thousand tons of sugar from this year's crop, it is more than last year's level. The cost of sugar in the world markets is currently 750-760 dollars, said Deputy Prime Minister of Belarus.  "We sell it to Europe, to Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland. We get good dividends".