Farmers do not note an improvement in the fuel situation
The HEAD of the Ministry of Agriculture, Dmitry Patrushev, assured at the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) that the situation with fuel supplies to farmers will not affect the harvest , and it has improved significantly compared to the previous week, TASS wrote on September 12. “We are now solving this problem manually. <…> Everything will be fine. We will reap the harvest and weed out the winter crops ,” the minister said, although a week earlier he expressed fears that the lack of fuel would threaten to stop the harvesting campaign and winter sowing. In turn, Energy Minister Nikolai Shulginov reported that the Ministry of Energy is working to stabilize the fuel market. Governmentand fuel producers agreed on how to act, fuel physically appeared, the issue of price regulation remained, President Vladimir Putin noted during the WEF .
The general DIRECTOR of the Elan company from the Orenburg region, Alexey Orlov, confirms that recently the price of fuel has risen sharply. “We buy a small supply of fuel - about a week - during periods of intense work,” he said. — We cannot store a larger volume at the enterprise, since this requires warehouses that meet certain requirements. We store as much as our fuel refueling modules can hold. When this supply ran out and we wanted to buy fuel again, it turned out that it was out of stock, and the price had increased significantly.” The company was forced to purchase fuel at a significantly higher price. Back in mid-August, Orlov recalls, Elan purchased fuel at 57 thousand rubles/t, at the beginning of September it already cost 73 thousand rubles/t, and by mid-September the price reached 83 thousand rubles/t.
“Now the Ministry of Agriculture says that there is no fuel shortage in the country, and the department believes that they have solved the problem with fuels and lubricants,” says Orlov. “However, there is no talk of reducing prices at all, and I don’t see any prerequisites for this.” He clarifies that, despite the increase in costs, the company will still complete the harvesting and carry out winter sowing. “The only question is at whose expense the banquet will be,” adds Orlov.
Over two months - July-August - the cost of fuel and lubricants increased by 30 thousand rubles / ton, the growth exceeded 35%, echoed by Maxim Misharev, production manager of the Pokrovsky Concern Group of Companies (Krasnodar Territory). The purchase price for September was 85 thousand rubles, and in mid-September suppliers offer prices90-100 thousand rubles/t, he shares. “There is no improvement in the situation, and the main issue is still the availability of fuel. Suppliers have no idea what volumes they will be able to ship in October, and prices continue to rise,” he laments. Now the concern's farms continue harvesting SUGAR beets and other crops in their fields. “We buy fuel at the prices that are on the market,” Misharev clarifies. “However, the sowing of winter crops is ahead, and the lack of diesel fuel during this period may lead to a stop or delay in field work.”
The AgroGard group of farms is currently seeing improvements in terms of fuel availability in the Central Federal District - in a number of regions where the company operates, the quota for fuel exports from supplier bases has been increased. But in the South the situation has not changed, and fuel is still not shipped from the bases of Rosneft and Lukoil, shares the company’s general director Pavel Tsarev. “Due to the increase in fuel prices since the beginning of August this year, our costs have increased by approximately 37 million rubles. or 23%,” he calculates. — With an adequate price of 58 thousand rubles/t in the South and 54 thousand rubles/t in the Center, the average purchase price taking into account the increase in prices for the period from the beginning of August to September 14 amounted to 80 thousand rubles/t and 68 thousand . rub./t respectively.”
The head of the Tambovagropromkhimiya Group of Companies, Valery Solopov, said that the holding had certain fuel reserves, so the current jump in prices for fuels and lubricants has not yet affected it much. “Because of this, we are trying to work in economy mode; we had to reduce activity in some field work, but in general it is going on as usual,” he says. The company is also observing a serious increase in the cost of plant protection products, equipment, spare parts and consumables. “If prices for fuels and lubricants do not stabilize, then the industry will have a hard time, especially small enterprises and those that do not have a margin of safety,” Solopov fears. — Now in the Tambov region I see a fairly even situation, there is no deterioration. I think it should get better."
In August, the president of the national association of road freight transport Gruzavtotrans, Vladimir Matyagin, told the National News Service that the rise in price of diesel fuel was due to a conspiracy among fuel companies. From September 1 of this year, oil companies have had their fuel damper payments halved until the end of 2026. As a result of this adjustment, payments to oil workers from the budget will decrease by 30 billion rubles. per month, Interfax previously wrote. The damper mechanism for petroleum products has been operating in RUSSIA since 2019. Until April 2023, it was calculated based on the difference between the EXPORT price of fuel and the indicative domestic price, which is designated by law. If this difference was positive and exportbecame more profitable than supplies to the domestic market, then the state paid the oil companies; if the difference was negative, the oil companies paid to the budget.
Interfax sources previously noted that there are problems with the timely delivery of Russian Railways cars with petroleum products to the final branches of fuel supply companies. Nikolai Shulginov, in an interview with RIA Novosti during the EEF, said that the fuel shortage in the south of Russia is largely not due to logistical difficulties, but was provoked by the closure of gas stations and the creation of an artificial shortage, since “someone was simply trying to play on the situation.” He also added that fuel production meets market needs.