INFORMATION SUPPORT FOR MANAGING THE PROCESSES OF REGULATING THE DEPENDENCE OF RUSSIAN AGRICULTURE ON IMPORTS OF SEEDS AND SEED MATERIAL
The authors present the results of research conducted in order to find the ways to regulate the seed import dependence of agriculture in Russia. It is shown that the ongoing crisis in the Russian system of selection and seed production has led to an increased dependence of Russian producers on imports of seeds of sugar beet, sunflower, corn, vegetables, potatoes, etc. In 2018 the share of imported seeds used in Russia varied from 30 to 90% (90% for sugar beet, 50-70% for other industrial crops, and 40-50% for potatoes and other vegetables). The authors reveal the disadvantages of the Russian system of selection, i.e. a certain degree of isolation, passivity of market behavior, low level of competitiveness, lack of a long-term development strategy, weak material and technical base, and insufficient availability of specialists. At present there are 42 crop production centers in Russia. They operated even before the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2013 on the basis of the leading research institutes of the Plant Growing Department of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Until 2020 the Ministry of Agriculture plans to put 87 seed-breeding centers (SBC) into operation, of which 61 will be created from scratch, and the rest will be modernized. The state is ready to support the creation of such centers by providing a compensation for part of direct costs incurred for the creation and (or) modernization of objects of the agroindustrial complex. A significant problem in increasing the efficiency of management of processes that regulate the dependence of agriculture in Russia on seed imports is a low quality of the information support system. This requires the creation of a unified information database that would contain the information on the supply of seeds and planting material of domestic and foreign selection and potential and actual demand for them. It should also allow assessing the level of dependence on imports in the context of individual agricultural crops. An algorithm is proposed for the functioning of the information support system for managing the processes of regulating the dependence of Russian agriculture on the import of seeds and seed material.