Fish in Central Region

Photo: Sergey Krasnoukhov / RIA Novosti A fish is a domino figure, after which it is customary to count the bones. And also the meat of aquatic vertebrates, at the sight of which we more and more often count our money, and ... we pass by the counter. Still, the Far Eastern salmon with its head costs 960 rubles per kilogram in inexpensive "Ashan", and in "Azbuka Vkusa" red fish is sold at a price of 1680 rubles (Russia) to 3149 rubles (Faroe Islands) per kilogram. An unexpected vertical rise in prices for these products led to the fact that the consumption of salmon meat in Central Russia in a year and a half decreased by five times, and fish in general from 22 to 19 kilograms per person. At the same time, Russia continues to be surrounded from the north and from the east by exceptional economic maritime territories 200 nautical miles (374 kilometers) wide, where our Russian fish is found, which, in accordance with the UN convention, should regularly come to our table. The catch of this fish by Russian fishermen is growing from year to year and tod Fish in Central Region ay amounts to about 4.4 million metric tons, that is, 31.2 kilograms per capita per year, including babies and excluding imports. Where is our legitimate fish and why it suddenly became inaccessible, the special correspondent of "Lenta.ru" found out. The answer is surprisingly simple - fishing companies have forgotten that this is "our" fish. It is overlooked that the cod, halibut and sockeye, herring, coho and chinook salmon, which are found under Russia's exclusive economic maritime territories, are as essential a country's resource as oil and gas, nickel and diamonds. And as a result of this convenient amnesia - while the oil and gas miners fill the federal reserve fund, provide the salaries of teachers and the military - the fishermen simply sell the best fish to the one who pays the most. And this, alas, is not a Russian buyer. “A little more than a thousand companies receive quotas and fish in Russia, each of which owns from one to several dozen vessels of drifters, trawlers, and so on,” explains our expert, executive director of the non-profit organization “Fish Union” Sergey Gudkov. - All of them calmly sell their catch all over the world. The Russian Federation is only one of the sales regions for them. Obviously, Russian buyers cannot pay for fish as much as Japanese and EU citizens, so the highest quality fish, of the highest and first categories, goes to foreign markets. High-quality in this case is fish of the same size, certain fat content, frozen almost immediately after catch, stored for a minimum time, without creases, and so on. Such fish can go to us, but in this case its price will be exactly the same as on the world market. Inside the country, fish of the highest category is bought only by restaurants and, possibly, by retail chains like Azbuka Vkusa. Of the 4.4 million metric tons of fish caught in Russia, we still get 2.6 million, but this fish is of “different” quality, and its price does not correlate in any way with the level of salaries in the country, but only with the international fish exchange. Due to the crisis, that is, the devaluation of the ruble and the food embargo with Europe, the selling price of fish in rubles has increased by almost 100 percent over the past two years. Sometimes it comes to the point of absurdity: for example, due to the termination of the supply of herring fillets from Norway and Iceland, this raw material (frozen, wholesale) is sold on the domestic market of the Russian Federation one and a half times more expensive than in the EU. We now eat twice as much herring, replacing inaccessible salmon, and fillets in Russia are made only a dozen thousand tons. Market laws: little fillet - high price. Fishermen receiving salmon at the coastal fish processing factory of the V.I.Lenin fishing collective farm in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky Photo: Alexander Piragis / RIA Novosti Someone over forty, of course, remember the last years of the USSR, when the stores were full of fish, of excellent quality and for a penny. And this is true - in 1986 the USSR set an absolute record, catching 11 million 276 thousand tons of fish. But few people know how such prices and abundance were provided. Firstly, the fleet was state-owned, it was built on state money, and the fishermen had never heard of payments for ships on loans. There were many ships - whole fleets went out into the ocean, on which fish were caught, and cut, and frozen. Secondl https://jiji.ug/central-region/fish