This year the Ministry of agriculture expects to complete the work on the inclusion of finished dairy products into “Mercury”
According to him, it will allow providing traceability of goods of animal origin and will become an obstacle to falsification. "The inclusion of controlled goods of finished dairy products into the list will give an additional impetus to the development of the industry, and will bring the attitude of consumers to domestic to a new level", said the Minister.
Patrushev noted that now "Mercury" continues to expand, every day about 6 million certificates are registered in the system. At the same time, without traceability and thorough quality control system throughout the production chain from raw materials to finished products, it will be impossible to create a brand of "green" products, said the Minister of agriculture, reminding that such a task was set by President Vladimir Putin. This is one of the new areas on which the Ministry of agriculture will focus this year.
Last week, Deputy Head of the Rosselkhoznadzor Nikolay Vlasov said that, according to the Department, almost a quarter of dairy products produced in Russia in 2018 were falsified. "If we talk about packaged finished products, we produce, according to expert estimates, 60 billion packages per year. A quarter of them, that is 15 billion packages, are falsified", he said (quoted by TASS). Taking into account imported products, the share of falsification is 22%.
One of the main problems of the dairy industry is the falsification of the brand, but the inclusion of finished products into “Mercury” will help to solve this problem, believes Mr. Vlasov. Then the circulation of illegal raw milk will gradually stop. Now the task is to reduce the volume of falsification to an acceptable level — 0.5%, he said, noting that at present the Rosselkhoznadzor does not see any positive changes, but expects that the results will appear during this year.
The gradual inclusion of dairy products into "Mercury" system must begin since 1 July, fermented dairy products will be added into the list since November 1. At the same time, some market participants continue to oppose certification and advocate digital labelling. At the end of March the “Vedomosti” reported that Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev supported the labeling of finished dairy products and gave an oral instruction to integrate it with the “Mercury” system.
The obligatory electronic veterinary certification system in the “Mercury” system was launched in Russia on July 1, 2018, but shortly before that, finished dairy products were excluded from it.
