However, an official spokesman of Denis Manturov, Russia’s Minister of Industry and Trade, says that the Russian government will probably reject the introduction of any artificial barriers on the imports of Western devices into the country, as such measures would be contrary to WTO rules and may result in huge fines for Russia.
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Farmers in France, Belgium and Germany have staged protests against falling prices, especially for milk and dairy products, following both the Russian ban and a sharp slowdown in the Chinese market.
According to that same report, while this grand gesture was just the beginning, Russian Federation will be destroying contraband Western foods on a daily basis from now on, if need be. The Kremlin?s ban of many Western agricultural products imposed a year ago has forced restaurant owners to replace them with home-made ones.
The ban was a response to economic sanctions enacted by the U.S. and its European allies over Russia’s attempts to exert its influence on neighboring Ukraine.
The Federal Service for Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance, the country’s main public health watchdog, said officials had recovered Polish and Irish meat from traders in the Moscow suburb of Reutov, Polish apples in Novosibirsk and vegetables in Tver.
Nevertheless, EU exporters managed to diversify destinations and even slightly increase the overall value of agri-food exports.
Domestic television showed officials dumping truckloads of orange cheeses on a patch of wasteland and then flattening them with a steamroller in the Belgorod region near Ukraine.
The order to destroy the illegal imports was made in July.
President Vladimir Putin final week signed a decree ordering the trashing of all meals – from gourmand cheeses to fruit and greens – that breaches a year-old embargo on Western imports imposed in retaliation for sanctions over the Ukraine disaster.
By the end of the day, a total of 319 tonnes of food was destroyed.
“In general, Russians have quite a reverent attitude to food, to the work of those who produce it. A large part of the population sees the burning [and] destruction of benign products as blasphemous”, she said.
On Thursday Russian authorities began bulldozing the seized food, causing a huge public outcry in a country in the middle of a recession.
“People have a kind heart, but they don’t understand the nature of (contraband)”, agency representative Alexei Alexeyenko told Russia’s RSN radio station, speaking of the hundreds of thousands who signed the petition.
Timur Nigmatullin, an analyst at investment holding Finam, says that banned goods are continuing to leak across the Russian border principally because of the legal framework on which the Eurasian Union – the Russia-led economic organization of which Belarus, Kazakhstan and Armenia are also members – is based.
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A spokeswoman for the food safety agency Rosselkhoznadzor said in a statement released by the agriculture ministry on Thursday that the flattened cheese – amounting to nearly nine tonnes – would be buried underground.
