Food security assessment in the regions of the Volga federal district

The article presents the results of studying the main indicators that characterize the level of food security in the regions of the Volga Federal District. In the context of increasing infl uence of global challenges and risks on developing Russian food market, the assessment of the regions’ capabilities to ensure the physical and economic availability of food becomes relevant. The article has carried out calculations of generalizing indicators of food security in the regions of the Volga Federal District on the basis of food resource balances. The authors reveals that the values of the coeffi cients of self-sufficiency and physical accessibility for food groups in the regions of the Volga Federal District are close to the average Russian values. There is an increase in physical availability for the considered food groups, except for dairy products, but the unbalanced structure of consumption remains. In the Volga Federal District, a critical situation is developing with the provision of fruits and berries to population. The study showed that ensuring the physical availability of such products as meat and meat products, milk and dairy products, vegetables, depends on increasing domestic production in the territory of the Volga Federal District. The development of the own production does not allow completely abandoning import of food, so signifi cant attention in agricultural policy should be paid to optimizing the movement of food fl ows, the formation of an effective logistics infrastructure between the regions. This will help to reduce regions’ differentiation in terms of consumption of basic food products. Negative trends have been identifi ed in changes in the economic availability of food. In 2019, the coeffi cient of economic availability of food was 98.1% in the Volga Federal District, the Russian Federation - 103.7%. Only four regions had a level of economic availability of food above 100%. The differentiation of this indicator by the regions of the Volga Federal District is 1.5 times. It is necessary to form a system of measures that stimulate the growth of population’s income.