Vladimir Yakovlev, Regional Development Minister, and Alexei Gordeyev, Agriculture Minister, attended today's conference on the concepts of rural settlement development.
Pilot projects will be launched in several parts of Russia next year for up-to-date villages to rise, said Mr. Gordeyev as he was summing up the conference for the media.
The efforts will base in the Non-Black-Earth Belt in European Russia's heartland, in Siberia and the Russian Far East, he added.
"We want to pool in the two ministries' efforts and produce a new viewpoint on rural development, which is an essential part of regional policies," the minister went on.
"A third of Russian villages are dying out," he stressed.
According to his ministry's alarming statistics, Russia presently has 150,000 rural settlements. In 20 per cent of the total, the population is below ten, and 10 per cent have no permanent residents at all. The percentage of families with incomes below the subsistence level is twice as great in the country than in town.
To diversify the rural economy, and promote multi-structural farming, handicrafts and tourism is among pivotal prerequisites for steady economic progress of the Russian countryside, hold Gordeyev and Yakovlev.
