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Kuriles Budget Higher Than the Japanese
// Government makes islands best served part of Russia
The administration will approve the Socio-Economic Development of the Kurile Islands 2007-2015 program today. That program will make the islands the most budgeted part of Russia. In the next nine years, the government will try to show special care for the region, which Japan calls its northern territories, by spending $1000 per person per month there. That is 40 percent more than Japan spends per citizen on average.
A ten-year development program for the Kuriles ended last year. In that time, the islands' population shrunk from 11,000 to 6500. Of all Russian regions, only Chechnya experienced more drastic depopulation. On of the goals of the new program is “to increase the attractiveness of the Kuriles as a place to live.” Minister of Economic Development and Trade German Gref will present the program toady at the administration session. The program calls for 17.9 billion rubles to be spent on the islands in the next nine years, including 14.2 billion rubles from the federal budget. That breaks down to 300,000 rubles per year per resident (which is more than in Chechnya, but 30-35 percent less than in the United States) and 200,000 rubles per square meter per year. By comparison, 2007 federal budget expenses amount to 36,900 rubles per person.
The development program for the islands that ended last year was deemed a failure due to its underfunding. The administration of Sakhalin Region says that only 40 of 153 projects envisaged in the program were carried out. Gref said yesterday that the previous program was funded at 200-250 million rubles per year. The massive scale of the new program is intended to demonstrate to the Japanese that Russia does not intend to give up the islands, even though Japan claims them and no peace treaty has been signed between Russia and Japan. The largest outlays will go for reconstruction of the islands' airport and ports (2.5 billion rubles), the electricity and heating system (2.5 billion rubles), the fishing industry (more than 5 billion rubles), social needs (2.3 billion rubles) and road construction (2.9 billion rubles).
The economic expedience of those investments is based on the fact that seismological investigations conducted on the shelf around the islands indicate the possible presence of oil and natural gas. There are also gold and silver deposits on the islands and one-fifth of the fish and other bioresources harvested in Russia come from the islands' waters. In the description of the development program obtained by Kommersant, however, there is no indication of the financial returns the government expects under the program.
Petr Netreba
All the Article in Russian as of Aug. 03, 2006
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