WTO requested Kazakhstan not to support its agricultural sector - President

AKMOLA REGION. KAZINFORM Today at the meeting with the governors of Akmola, North Kazakhstan and Kostanay regions, President Nursultan Nazarbayev said that the World Trade Organization had requested Kazakhstan to stop financing the country's agricultural sector.

"While negotiating our accession to the WTO, we were requested to stop subsidizing our agricultural sphere. They said we are uncompetitive. We proved that other countries take similar steps to support their agricultural producers," the Head of State said and added that the abovementioned regions received one third of all governmental funds allocated to the country's agricultural sector. "That is 135 bln tenge, 3.5 thousand units of vehicles under lease and 51 thousand heads of cattle under Sybaga program. 170 projects worth 103 bln tenge have been implemented here by KazAgro," The President stressed. "Thanks to this work, productivity rates in three regions rose twofold and reached 1 mln 200 thousand tenge per person employed. It's a good indicator, but not enough for us," N.Nazarbayev noted. "We possess huge potential for exporting domestic agricultural products. However, agricultural sector has not diversified our economy yet. Our productivity is two times lower than in Belarus and Russia and 10 times lower than in the EU, U.S., Canada and Australia," the President concluded