Italy and Spain are seeking, in negotiations with Moscow, the lifting of counter-sanctions in exchange for registration of the Russian vaccine in Europe.
Liberal Russian political scientist Stanislav Belkovsky stated this in an interview with Kyiv journalist Natalya Vlashchenko, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“Currently there is a discussion that Russia can lift counter-sanctions - a ban on food imports from Italy and Spain, and these are Parmesan and jamon so beloved by some sections of our society. They want to lift sanctions in exchange for the registration of Russian vaccines in Europe,” Belkovsky said.
The attempts of the Italians to return supplies of sanctioned cheeses to Russia are confirmed by Russian entrepreneur Oleg Sirota, owner of the Russian Parmesan cheese factory.
"Why are they doing that? They understand that they are losing the Russian market forever and are trying to somehow return to it.
Despite the hype on the Internet, Russia is successfully implementing an import substitution program. Milk production increased by almost 6 percent over the 25 years of counter-sanctions. This is a record that even the Soviet Union did not have.
Import substitution for cheeses is also going very well. In general, it has been completely successful in farm cheeses (there is a boom in projects here), in mozzarella and buratta, in blue cheeses, and is now approaching complete replacement in semi-hard cheeses.
To understand, my native Moscow region alone, which in the first months of this year came out on top in Russia in cheese production, has launched more than 200 cheese factories. From scratch! At the same time, we, cheese makers of the Moscow region, are not only engaged in development, but also actively looking at export markets.
We still have the most difficult niche left untapped - with Parmesan. It is really complicated and long - you first need to build farms for a special diet for cows, then launch giant expensive cellars, and then store the cheese for several years. There is another problem here - the technology for producing Parmesan takes a long time to fine-tune: you boil the cheese, put it in the cellar, and after a couple of years you find out where you went wrong. And you start again. We are going through this process - the first Parmesan was tasty, but meaty, similar to Swiss sbrinz, and we corrected it. Debugging.
This is truly the most difficult and expensive thing in milk processing, and in general one of the most difficult processes in agriculture is its crowning glory. This is roughly the same as aircraft manufacturing and automotive manufacturing in industry.
We need another 5-7 years to finally resolve the issue with Parmesan. Allowing the import of imported Parmesan will simply stop investment and render the colossal investments required for this pointless. But after this period, we will not only produce it, but also begin to actively export it. We just need time. Nine women cannot give birth to one child in a month, and it’s about the same with Parmesan,” Sirota writes on her blog.
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