vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #560 / Special reports / Reading article...

The lack of the federal government’s coherent policy toward the development of the Russian Far East may lead to the already sparse territory’s population drastically dropping by one third by 2025, Khabarovsk’s regional Governor Viktor Ishayev told a meeting of Russia’s Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Tuesday.

With the current demographic tendencies, the population of the far east of Russia is expected to drop off after the year 2010, with its numbers plummeting to only 4.7 million by the year 2025, a press statement from Khabarovsk region’s administration reported Ishayev as saying.

According to Ishayev, for the years 1991-2005 the number of the territory’s residents went down by 1.5 million people, with over 80 percent of those migrating.

The present demographic situation results from the gloomy state of the economy and social sphere in the Russian Far East due to the government’s feeble strategies to propel the remote territory, he said.

“The rates of the Russian Far East’s economic growth considerably lag behind the average one in Russia, with a 24-percent gap in the gross domestic product’s growth rate,” Itar-Tass quoted Ishayev as saying. According to him, this lag in the social and economic development will only result in a growing social tension in Far Eastern regions.

The trend will be stopped only by implementing large-scale investment projects and developing local industries, the governor stressed. Among the projects, he mentioned creating a manufacturing zone on the Russian-Chinese border which would stimulate domestic production and provide more jobs.

Another means necessary to improve the territory’s poor infrastructure are increasing the annual sum allocated for the federal program to develop the Russian Far East and stimulating economic development of its northern territories, Ishayev noted.

The Russian Far East, a vast territory rich in natural resources, covers 6.2 million square kilometers and has a population of 7 million people. At present, according to the statistics, some 274 people leave the territory daily which has resulted in a 20 percent decrease in its population in the recent 15 years.

In December 2006, President Vladimir Putin urged the creation of a special commission headed by Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to jumpstart development in the Russian Far East.