Kirill Molodyko at Financial Management in Agribusiness Conference
He spoke about the specifics of Eastern food markets and the prospects for attracting Islamic finance into the Russian agricultural sector.
On 15 April, Kirill Molodyko, a leading research fellow at the HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development, spoke at the Financial Management in Agribusiness conference which was held in Moscow by CFO Russia. He made a presentation on Islamic Financial Instruments to Enhance Russian Food Exports to Asia and Africa.
In his presentation, Kirill noted that raising debt or equity and subsidizing interest rates on bank loans are not the only instruments available for agribusiness financing. From an economic point of view, such financing also occurs via a transfer of cheap advanced agricultural technologies or implementation of staff training programmes. In this context, the speaker called on the audience to cooperate with the Higher School of Economics in its new joint projects with Germany’s Bayer: the selection of Russian companies to receive germplasm on preferential terms and the future training of agriculture professionals at the HSE’s continued education centre which is to open soon.
In the second part of his presentation, Kirill Molodyko dwelled on the main points of the report “The Strategy for Russia's Presence in the World Food Markets” prepared by a team of the HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development. The speaker expressed confidence that the best prospects for the Russian agricultural expansion are offered by the Asian and African markets.
At the same time, investments in crop production are meaningless without simultaneous investments in the development of transport logistics, including the North-South transport corridor via the Volga river and the Caspian sea. Without these investments, the situation of 2017, when significant volumes of Russian crop, even though in demand abroad, rotted due to the physical inability to export them, will repeat again and again. For these reasons, Mr. Molodyko paid particular attention in his talk to the specifics of Eastern food markets and to those methods of attracting Islamic finance in the Russian agro-industrial complex and the development of national transport logistics that are based on the traditional contracts under Islamic law (fiqh).