Moscow, 27 October: The prime minister of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, is unhappy about Russia's excessive dependence on raw material exports. Over the past eight years the volume of Russian foreign trade has gone up 2.2 times, Putin told a government meeting on Monday (27 October). Nevertheless, the structure of foreign trade, according to him, "still remains unsatisfactory".

"Russia still excessively depends on exports of hydrocarbons and other raw material products and, hence, on the fluctuation of world prices," the prime minister said.

"In our own internal market the domestic producer is often behind foreign producers and we are being pressed by imports," Putin said.

According to him, Russian goods and services are still not well represented in fast growing regions, including Latin America and the Asia-Pacific Region.

"Unfortunately, we regularly come across dishonest trading practices and invented barriers for exports of Russian goods and imports of high technologies to our country," he said.

According to the prime minister, formally, even restrictions which were introduced in an entirely different era for a different country and for a different reason have not been abolished - such as, for example, the Jackson-Vanick amendment, which Putin described as a political anachronism.

The prime minister said a lot had already been done to strengthen Russia's standing in the world market: in particular, hundreds of investment projects have been implemented and exports of products of domestic engineering have doubled over the past eight years. (Passage omitted)

At its meeting on Monday the government discussed the draft main guidelines for Russian foreign economic policy until 2020.

According to a government source, the document is confidential, but it also has an open part which will be published later.

("We need to reinforce these trends, to turn the system of state support for exports into a development tool which is convenient and accessible for domestic producers - and above all for those industries where we have a substantial export potential," Putin said, as broadcast by Russian Vesti TV. "It is no accident that we have set up aircraft construction and shipbuilding corporations. Russia has always had good positions in the area of space services, in the nuclear energy sector and in IT.

"Russia is also capable of becoming the world's largest exporter of agricultural produce and of making a substantial contribution to ensuring global food security."