Kazakhstan has chances to make an agribusiness empire – Agricultural Expert, Mr. Kirill Pavlov proves that using statistics and layman’s terms. Given statistics, he discussed the strong and the weak points of the Kazakh agribusiness.

In his Facebook account, Mr. Pavlov posted a rather interesting study of the Kazakh agribusiness. Literal translation below:

If a Cab, Then Be It a Bugatti!

“Kazakhstan needs to flee from wheat for dear life. Or, if Kazakhstan at all has to cultivate wheat, then it should be done seriously, because what we are doing now is something very ineffective.

Wheat, of course, does add resilience and offer space for experiments at the state level, but economically it makes us lose a big time. We are people who use microscopes to batter in nails, we drive Bugatti for tax purposes and we slay a whole sheep for a sheer bowl of broth. 

I can go on and on, inventing new allegories, but what sense will it make, when the end-result is depressing?

Not long time ago, I published the comparative analysis of yield capacities in various countries, but not many people comprehended the core sense of that. May be, for better understanding, we need to approach the problem under a different angle.

The aggregate analysis shows that the area of cultivated land puts us in the same group with Canada, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India. But the yield makes us a part of another group – together with Angola, Cameroon, Butane, Somalia, Rwanda, Congo, Mozambique, Burundi and Malawi.

Corn, as a New Bitcoin

Now, let us run another analytical exercise. Let us put production output on the X-axis and yield capacity – on the Y-axis, so not to complicate our exercise with the Cultivated Land Area variable. What do we see now? The wheat now is positioned far to the right, but very much in the low – which means, we have amounts, but the area of cultivated land is colossal.

Now, let us exclude the wheat from the exercise and pay attention to other cultures, otherwise it is impossible to see anything.

Potato is an absolute champion. Cucurbits, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and carrots give high yields and are marginal. Corns and sun-seeds are the new bitcoins, but there are questions to the Ministry of Agriculture and levies imposed on sun-seeds. We should be better-off having lifted our yield capacity upwards in the above graphs. As for crops of higher yield capacity, those should be pushed to the right in that above graphs, which means expanding the area of cultivated land. 

Nazarbayev’s Tax and Other Problems

There is no doubt that we live in the zone of risk faming, we have nasty climate and we are land-locked, but does Pakistan have better agricultural conditions? Do all those factors justify our positioning close to Eritrea?

Reasons for such low performance indicators are known – we plant the sixth reproduction waste into our land and we will do so for 10 years and more – no genetics, no crop rotation, fertilizers we inject less than taxes paid by Nazarbayev.  We don’t care about retention of snow and we do not observe plant health-care.

Our machinery is obsolete to 90%. They say, we got money to lease, but they won’t give it to farmers. Those moneys are deposited in the Zhasyl Damu Fund, because the latter needs them more.

Lack of specialists is another problem. Qualified mechanizers and agronomists are in the Red Book.  Agricultural colleges are not managed properly and the state will not give them away to private hands.

Well, of course, not all of them farmers are “slacking”, but the majority of them live like that.

Oligarch is a Public Enemy?

The result is obvious – we already cannot compete with Russia in wheat production (reference to yield capacity is specifically important here). Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan out-perform Kazakhstan in production of green-house vegetables – because our energy owners are excessively greedy and the cost of energy is the basis for the generation of prices here. Our oligarchs don’t care about the price-generation for socially significant vegetables. 

At the same time, we possess some serious potential and resilience, we just need to approach with more seriousness such issues, as technology, science and seedage. Sooner or later, we will deplete our oil reservoirs and we are still failing to make an advanced agricultural country. And we need to get away from wheat – step-by-step and with some well-conceived strategy, otherwise very soon we will be pushed far backwards.