Russians are worried about high potato prices

The leader of the pro-Putin Just Russia party, Sergei Mironov, is therefore proposing that the state start buying potatoes centrally from small private farms. He promises that this will force larger producers to lower prices.

The wholesale price of potatoes in Russia has increased by 85 percent since the beginning of the year, which is 4.4 times more than last spring. The average price of a kilogram of potatoes in the store at the end of April reached 85.4 rubles (23.60 CZK), which is almost three times more year-on-year, the Kommersant daily reported last week .

The significant price increase is mainly due to two factors: a decrease in the harvest in 2024 due to bad weather and a reduction in sown areas for this year, the daily added.

Mironov, who described potatoes as the "second bread," said in an interview with the state-run TASS agency that the solution lies in so-called private subsidiary farms. These are mostly run by families on small plots of land for their own consumption, with the surplus sold on local markets. So it is not primarily a commercial enterprise.

"When the state makes centralized purchases from small private producers and releases their products to the domestic market, then large producers will start reducing prices. Then we will not have ’golden’ potatoes and we will not have to import our ’second bread’ from abroad," he said.

Mironov also sees the problem in the fact that small private farmers do not have sufficient access to store shelves and long-term storage capacity due to competition from larger businesses. "Their crops rot and do not reach the market," he added.

Agriculture Minister Oksana Lutova said on Telegram last week that the situation with expensive potatoes should improve from July. “We will start harvesting our early potatoes, now we are also supplying Egyptian potatoes, and then Uzbek potatoes will arrive if everything is fine with their harvest. This will start to reduce prices,” she wrote.