The largest producer of berries, Lenin’s State Farm, has still not received permission to sell their products in the Moscow region, reported the company's director Pavel Grudinin to Russian News Service. The only option for the Moscow-based manufacturer is to sell strawberries and wild strawberry at markets on weekends.
"But when it is the right season, we need not just to be able to sell at the markets at the weekend but to be able to sell these things every day. Berries ripen not only on the weekend, but every day, so they must be collected and sold every day,” said Grudinin. At the same time, he noted that the products sold at the markets are not sold by the manufacturers but the sellers, who inflate the price.
Restricting access to the market, in this case to the Moscow city market, means that manufacturers are forced to restrain the collection of berries, and some of them simply rot.
According to Grudinin, even if the farm does obtain permission to trade in the city from Moscow’s Mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, they will only be able to start doing so next year.
The state farm is discussing the problem not only with the city major but also with the Russian Parliament. Today, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the Russian political party LDPR, demanded the resignation of the head of the Department of Commerce in Moscow, Alexei Nameryuk, at a meeting of parliament.
The farm, which grows fruit on 103 hectares in the Moscow region, was unable to sell the entire crop in the Moscow region alone, and therefore it started to sell in Moscow itself at markets on the weekends or on specially approved stalls. Moscow City Hall used to allow them sell at specially approved stalls at the entrances to subway stations for free and in the past the farm sold about 20 tons of strawberries a day this way.
In May 2015, the authorities changed the legislation governing the placement of non-stationary objects of trade, and the decision regarding the special stalls passed from the prefectural level to the level of the Department of Commerce in Moscow. Like last year, Grudinin expected to receive approval in less than a month. But the procedure was delayed. An appeal to the Department of Commerce, filed back in April, has still not been approved. The Federal Anti-Monopoly Committee sent the farm’s management to see the mayor of the city, it was expected that Sobyanin would answer today.
