DM Monitoring
Bishkek: Agriculture is back on the agenda. This week, Kyrgyzstan’s Minister of Agriculture, Food Industry and Land Reclamation Tilek Toktogaziyev shared plans and tasks to be solved in the coming years.
In particular, the minister drew attention to the fact that farmers, producers and suppliers in Kyrgyzstan need to unite and create an association to compete in the global market. According to him, currently the ministry is working on 3 directions:
1. Consolidation of farmers, producers and suppliers.
“This association has priority because many of our farmers alone will not be able to realize their potential in the global market. Domestic farmers have great potential to become a “hub” of high-quality halal products, but this can be achieved only by uniting,” he said.
2. Digitalization.
“As of today, we are introducing electronic document management in the ministry to provide accurate and timely information to farmers. Work is also underway to create an information system to provide agricultural services to citizens,” explained the minister.
З. The final direction, he said, is recycling.
According to agricultural expert Yuri Kurinsky, “the fact that the Ministry of Agriculture offers new ways of agricultural development is a welcome fact. It is important that all identified plans are implemented. Aims and objectives, which are set in any region or sphere, show the effectiveness of the authorities. There are quite a lot of urgent problems in agriculture. There is need to operate in parallel, to set new tasks, as well as to show at once the ways of their solution, and certainly to deal with the problems. As for digitalization, agriculture can also be brought to a new level, like the Western advanced agricultural powers. It is necessary to analyze, maybe even adopt a foreign approach in the application of digital and intelligent technologies in the agricultural sector of Kyrgyzstan.
The number of processing plants should also be increased. Farmers are constantly complaining about the lack of capacity. Often in the autumn, when the majority of farms are busy harvesting sugar beet, they face great congestion at Kainda Sugar Refining Mill. It is necessary to revive once-operating sugar factories all over the country.
