Krasnodar, 3 March. Farmers are anxious about the new terms set for replacing old agricultural machines. What is in particular at issue is the increased sum of the scrappage fee, which will inevitably result in increased expenses both for manufacturers of vehicles and for their final users – farmers.
The Association of Farming Equipment Dealers ASKHOD warns that such rise in prices before the beginning of field works will threaten hundreds of contracts and over a thousand vehicles that were preliminarily approved for investment loans and leasing.
The top managers of the machine-building corporation John Deere are also quite sceptical about the consequences of the legislative novelties. They believe that this initiative will restrict drastically the availability of up-todate hi-tech vehicles and affect significantly the labour productivity. “For instance, the scrappage fee for wheeled tractors with a capacity of no less than 281 horsepower will increase by 3.5 times, which may result in a 15% increase of the [manufacturer’s] process cost, and this load will forcedly be put on the buyers – the farmers,” Regional Manager Oleg Nikolaev warns. Vasili Abaev, Chairman of the Krasnodar Association of Manufacturers of Farming Equipment, noted that if the prices would not surge up immediately, it would happen only due to the fact that many companies still had a good stock of materials.
Aleksandr Shipulin, Chairman of the Krasnodar Association of Farmers, Cooperatives and Other Small Agricultural Producers, was quoted as calling the existing situation as very hard for the farmers.
“We had fewer yields than expected, and as a result the food prices went up,” he reminded. “But these surges in cost triggered a stormy reaction [in all strata] up to the nation’s leadership. The prices for farmers’ products are retained at low levels, while the cost of machines and means of production, metals and other raw materials has grown up. Very man [farmers] cannot withstand it, and I regret to say that we may soon observe a decrease in their number.”
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