Excerpt from report by the Kazakh news agency
Interfax-Kazakhstan on 21st September

Almaty, 21st September: The Fatherland [Otan] Party and the
Agroindustrial Union of Kazakhstan have signed a long-term
mutually beneficial cooperation agreement, the acting chairman
of the Fatherland Party, Sergey Tereshchenko, told a news
conference on Tuesday [21st September].

The joint declaration of the party and the agroindustrial
union says that the "common nature of the programmes" and
"coincidence of the assessment of the conditions of the
agroindustrial sector will be the basis for developing a
concrete programme for getting agriculture out of crisis".
The Fatherland Party and the agrounion believes that
agriculture can be revived "only through all-round state
support and privileged crediting". Both organizations consider
it their duty to render help to farmers, scientiests and
technologists in their cooperative societies. One of the
tendencies of their programme, as they put it, must become the
development of an agrarian infrastructure and processing
industry in rural places.

In his interview to Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency
Tereshchenko called the forecasts by the Agrarian Party of the
republic that in future the republic might produce 35m tonnes
of grain a year "unreal." He added that "in the next 10 years
Kazakhstan should set itself a task to harvest 20 - 22m tonnes
of grain". In 1999, Tereshchenko thinks that Kazakhstan may
harvest 12m tonnes of grain, of which about 3-4m tonnes might
be exported and 3m tonnes will be channelled for domestic
consumption.

Tereshchenko thinks that the "government must lobby access
for agriculture to our neighbours' markets", because "not much"
is consumed in the country. In his opinion, in five to seven
years, Kazakhstan must become the biggest exporter of
agricultural products, including grain, meat, and be present in
the markets of Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and
China.

Tereshchenko thinks that today, attracting investment to
the agrarian sector must be "issue number one".
[passage to end omitted: foreign technologhy must be
brought in; unprofitable villages must be moved to more
profitable areas; background information on Tereshchenko]

Source: Interfax-Kazakhstan news agency, Almaty, in Russian
0846 gmt 21 Sep 99
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