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Lukashenko on ways to keep youth in rural communities

22.06.2022

If rural communities have normal conditions for life and work, then people will come, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko said as he visited the Yubileiny agricultural company in Orsha District on 21 June, BelTA has learned.

"If conditions for life and work are good, people will come," the head of state answered a question about what measures need to be taken to keep young people in rural communities.

Aleksandr Lukashenko said that in the past, when he was the head of a farm, he faced the problem of an excess of personnel and that, in his opinion, is worse than a shortage. "But there should be no deficit either," the president emphasized.

He drew attention to the fact that the working conditions for farmers have improved significantly in recent years. Modern high-performance equipment facilitates human labor and replaces the need for many workers. "The population in the countryside will not be excessive. Such is a tendency in Belarus, as in the whole world," Aleksandr Lukashenko explained.

If Belarus had not preserved such large forms of economy as collective and state farms but had opted for fragmentation into private farms, the outflow of people from rural communities would have been even greater, the president is sure. However, the country has preserved both, private and state, farms which helps the agricultural industry to develop steadily. "There are more farmers in some places and fewer in others. Some leave and some come and so on. Sometimes we sign loss-making collective and state farms to bigger farms. But the population will still decline. I am trying to keep people in rural communities. But still the statistics say that the population in the countryside is significantly decreasing. But it is sufficient because equipment is more advanced now," the head of state said.

"What we need is normal conditions, nothing else. And people will choose. Finding a job is not that easy in bigger cities. There has already been some outflow from cities to rural communities," the Belarusian leader continued.

The president recalled that agro-towns have been developed in Belarus at his insistence. Their goal was to create more comfortable living conditions in order to keep people in smaller communities. However, all this will not yield results if jobs and decent working conditions are not created, the head of state emphasized. "But they should be supplemented with good conditions for work: good equipment, good complexes such as a machine yard, a grain mill. By the way, at first we faced some imbalance: we set up agro-towns but technologies and equipment lagged behind. Now we are making up for this imbalance," Aleksandr Lukashenko said. “This process is not fast. There is not one farm, but there are thousands of them. But over the five-year period, things will change for the better in agriculture too if we seize this moment of growing food prices," the Belarusian leader said.

Written by belta.by