Belarus' foreign trade balance hits record

Over the past nine months, Belarus' foreign trade balance has reached $4 billion. This is a record sum.

Any sanctions are a stress for any country - the debt relations are broken, logistics are disturbed and in the end a simple person suffers, stated the Minister of Agriculture Igor Brylo. While answering the question of whether the agriculture turned out to be ready for the sanctions pressure, the Minister said: "We have two figures: in the mid-1990s we produced 10% of the agricultural machinery (tractors, combines) of the technological process. That is, if such sanctions had been imposed on Belarus in 1995, there would probably be no country. Now we produce 87% of the whole chain of such equipment. So, in principle, even though we have some imported equipment on our fields, we can confidently say today that we have passed that exam."

This year has shown record numbers in crop production. Milk and poultry production has also increased. Also this year we realized how important the quality is. If we step back from the numbers and look at the quality indicators, Belarus has achieved, such level of production performance that we probably did not even hope for ourselves.

Anastasia Bobrova, Head of the Centre for Human Development and Demography of the Institute of Economics of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus:

"The year was not easy and everyone felt it. Enterprises, agricultural industry experienced problems with personnel. But these very same personnel gave this influx, because they went to retrain and retraining. They helped themselves and the economy. Thus we increased the qualitative growth. Under the existing tough conditions, everyone accumulated everything they could. And this gave results."