Azerbaijan, Baku, Oct. 31 / Trend A.Akhundov /
Azerbaijan has already launched the autumn-winter fieldwork to produce a harvest in 2011, Azerbaijani Agriculture Minister Ismat Abbasov said.
"It is expected to carry out sowing of winter crop in an area of 900,000 hectares in accordance with the state programs. To this end, about 583 000 hectares have been plowed and about152, 000 high quality seeds, which have passed laboratory tests and certified, reserved" he said. Abbasov said 172,300 hectares have already been sowed.
"The necessary measures have been taken to carry out the sowing campaign at the optimum time," Abbasov sad in his article published by the governmental pres-service.
As of Oct.1, about 1.863 million tons of grain (19.9 tons per hectare) was gathered from the territory of 936.300 hectares. It is 973.900 tons less than the same period of last year, the Azerbaijani State Statistics Committee said.
Azerbaijan will presumably collect two million tons of grain this year. About 1.3 million will fall to the food grain. Given the fact that the country's needs in wheat hit 1.5 million tons, the additional volumes are expected to be covered at the expense of grain import, particularly from Kazakhstan.
According to the state program to provide population with food in 2008-2015, the volume of grain production in the country should be at the level of 2.8 million tons a year. But the record was broken last year. Last year, 26.6 quintals of grain, or about three million tons in total, were collected from each hectare of land.
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