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#5 - JRL 2007-212 - JRL Home
Kremlin.ru
www.Kremlin.Ru
October 9, 2007
[Putin] Concluding Remarks at Meeting with the Council of Lawmakers
Federation Council, Moscow

PRESIDENT VLADIMIR PUTIN:

The seamless coexistence of elements in a chain is one of the main reasons for success in the area that we are looking at today. Of course we need to think about how to facilitate this, including the work of the legislative bodies in the regions. There are sub-committees dealing with education, agriculture and the economy. But I am sure that even when you are discussing the problems of development in individual industries, you are unlikely to consider meeting with colleagues to talk about how everything functions interdependently. And in order to achieve such a state in life, in education, we ourselves need, I mean those of us in the executive branch and in the legislature, to find a means of cooperation, to find a form of effective communication with colleagues. And I would ask you to give this your full attention.

But, in conclusion, I would like to talk about something else. Just now one of our colleagues was talking about importing food. There is not only the problem of importing food. As soon as real incomes start to rise, imports flood the country and overwhelm our own production. And, of course, in the sphere of agriculture this is particularly noticeable and significant. In major industrial centers, such as Moscow, the amount of imported food in the domestic market is simply shameful, a real disgrace.

But this is not the only area where imports are so vividly assert themselves. Here we have to begin at the most basic level with staff, with people. Everything depends on them. You know that in our largest, leading companies - companies that today are truly global companies and, first and foremost, those dealing with commodity trading - there is a system of management, a small number of senior management positions that are mostly staffed by foreign experts. And as long as we don't start a policy of import substitution (not only in major companies but in all other sectors of the economy and in administration as well), we are going to have to keep importing from other countries. Because, as we used to say, it is people that decide everything. And we have already been saying this for 10 years now, from the middle and maybe even from the beginning of the 1990s. This is the area in which the least has been done since that time. Please pay your most serious attention to this. Thank you.