Useful Beverage of Discord

Krasnodar, 27 November. Starting from January 20, 2021, marking of dairy products will be launched in Russia. Three months later, it will become mandatory. 

However, dairy farmers are far from being happy about this novelty: they consider this project useless, especially taking into account the existing state tracing system “Mercury.” To have the upcoming mandatory system introduced, the producers will have to buy expensive equipment for their farms and warehouses (reading cameras and high-speed Internet). Besides, their expenditures will rise due to the purchase of individual numbers to be ascribed to each product (60 kopecks per brand). 

On the other hand, our respondents from the regional Directorate of the Federal Consumer Rights Agency commented that it is necessary to introduce mandatory marking to counteract illegal import, manufacture and turnover of certain kinds of milk products, including pirated goods. In 2020, the Directorate performed research for compliance with the physical and chemical characteristics. It showed that 0.5% of the dairy products sold in Krasnodar krai failed to comply with the requirements, compared to 1.6% in 2018 and 0.7% in 2019. 

These detections of bad-quality products gave been proven by the Southern Interregional Directorate of the Federal Agency for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Supervision. During ten months of the current year, they took 269 samples of dairy products in the region, of which 49 samples (i.e. 18.2%) were recognized as falsified. The figure was lower than that of the previous year, when 85 samples out of 303 taken (28%) had been recognized as inadequate. 

Thus, a positive dynamics can be easily seen without any additional marking. 

The main causes of the low-quality goods were replacement of butterfat with vegetable oils. Konstantin Sinetsky, General Director of Kubanmoloko Dairy Industry Association, also has little sympathy with the new idea. He says that one of the reasons for the inexpediency of the introduction of digital marking for finished milk products is “its excessive, and for a number of manufacturers unbearable financial burden.” 

According to his calculations, the total expenses to be spent by the Kuban farmers that represent about 70% of the total production volume of milk products (those farmers who presented their calculations to the Association) would reach 1.7 billion roubles at least. Annual expenses for labelling their products would be no less than 1.1 billion roubles. 

In fact, the introduction of digital marking of finished dairy products may lead to degradation of the industry and refusal of many farmers to further deal with milk, Mr. Sinetsky forecasts. 

Murat Dudarev, Deputy Chairman of the regional branch of OPORA RUSSIA nongovernment association, also believes that the introduction of marking is an excessive measure. He said that “it is not clear why the Russian Government has appointed two mutually connected privately owned legal entities as the dairy monitoring operators – Operator-TsRPT LLC and USM Holdings (the latter will be directly engaged with the marking activity). He said that Operator-TsRPT is a privately owned company, whose 90% share – via a chain of connected legal entities – is owned by Alisher Usmanov and Vladimir Skoch.

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