Turkmenistan, Ashgabat, June 6 / Trend , G.Hasanov/
Turkmenistan started to harvest wheat. It is planned to harvest 1.6 million tons in 2009, while this figure amounted to about 1 million tons last year, the official Turkmen sources said.
Sown area covers over 900,000 hectares of land. The last meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers was devoted to the harvest issue and Vice-Chairman of the Cabinet M. Akmammedov made a report.
President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdymuhamedov demanded from the leaders of the agricultural sector to provide the whole complex of measures to timely and qualitatively carry out harvesting, the results of which will become a sort of assessment of all relevant parts of agrarian sector, the national TV channel Altyn Asyr reported.
During the Soviet period, Central Asian countries almost entirely depended on imports of grain and only over 70,000 tons were harvested locally. Food independence is one of the priorities of the agrarian reform. The measures comprise improving the culture of agriculture and developing selection work. The Turkmen media reported that about 50,000 hectares of the total sown area was allocated for high-yielding varieties of wheat, imported from the Stavropol region of Russia.
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