Current state of food security in the European North of Russia

Ensuring food security is one of Russia's strategically important tasks. In the context of increasing sanction pressure and the emergence of numerous external financial, regulatory, and other constraints on production and logistics in the food sector, this task becomes particularly significant, involving almost all regions of both the Chernozem and non-Chernozem zones of the country. The aim of the article is to assess the food security of the regions of the European North of Russia and to substantiate directions for its strengthening based on the activation of economic and non-economic factors. The information base consists of scholarly works and regulatory acts of the Russian Federation on food security, as well as data from Rosstat. To achieve this goal, we propose a methodological approach to assessing food security, based on calculating indicators of economic and physical accessibility of food, which allows for ranking the regions. As a result of its testing, it was found that in 2021–2023, the leaders in terms of food security among the regions of the European North were the Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions, which is due to the high level of monetary income of the population and the action of Engel’s law, as well as the conformity of the diet structure to rational norms. It was revealed that Vologda Region and the Nenets Autonomous Area had fundamentally different regional positions in terms of economic and physical accessibility of food. We put forward ways to strengthen the food security of the regions based on the use of economic and non-economic factors. The novelty of the research lies in establishing the relationship between economic and physical accessibility of food in the context of ensuring food security at the regional level; for the northern territories of Russia, high economic accessibility is a mechanism that, to a certain extent, offsets the low level of physical accessibility due to unfavorable natural and climatic conditions for economic activity.