OREANDA-NEWS. May 21, 2014. Ministry of Agriculture has developed the program "Development of the food industry in the Republic of Kazakhstan for 2015-2019" and the following key objectives will be implemented within it: increasing availability of agricultural raw materials, financial services, utilities and transport, packaging, creation of conditions for expansion of domestic sales of food products, development of consumer culture, training and retraining workers, technical regulations, improving taxation, trade regulation of exports and imports, recording turnover, as well as institutional development of public administration.

By 2019, it is expected that implementation of the program will result in increasing investment in fixed capital of food and processing industry by 3 times up to 97 billion tenge (in 2013 - 33 billion tenge), increase of 30% of food production to 1 271 billion tenge (in 2013 - 973 billion tenge), decrease in imports of food products tripled to USD 1 322 million (2013 - USD 2 977 million), increase in employment in the food industry to 68 million people (in 2013 - 52 thousand people).

Thus, according to the Statistics Agency of Kazakhstan, enterprises for processing agricultural raw materials produced 5% of the national industrial output and 16.5% - manufacturing in 2013.
Grain processing (23.5%), milk (16.3%), bread and bakery (15.3%), meat processing (13.4%), fruits and vegetables (8.1%), fat-and-oil (7.8%) and other industries occupy a major share in the production of foods.

At the same time, some items still have high level of imports. Food products worth more than USD 3 billion: mostly confectionery (USD 544.6 million), dairy products (USD 419.5 million), sugar (USD 240.5 million), poultry (USD 186.1 million), canned fruits and vegetables (USD 155.6 million) were imported to the country in 2013.

In general, the foreign trade turnover volume of processing industry and food industry products of the country amounted to USD 4 250 million in 2013.

Main reasons for the high proportion of imports, poor output growth of domestic product and incomplete workload of enterprises are problems in the field of technical regulations, including monitoring of standards, lack of qualified personnel, lack of development of trade and logistics infrastructure, low availability of working capital, high share of run-down equipment, lack of qualitative home-produced raw materials.

New instruments of government support in the form of investment grants, insurance and guarantee loans, interest rate subsidies on loans and leasing, financial improvement of agricultural sector entities and STB funding are provided to address the issues within the competence of the Ministry under the "Agribusiness 2020" approved in February 2013. Furthermore, the program includes a set of measures designed to ensure procurement of raw materials, technical and technological re-equipment of industry, increasing availability of financial resources, creation of conditions for the effective management of agribusiness.