Penza, 26 March 2016. PenzaNews. Georgy Kamnev, first secretary of the Regional Committee of the Communist Party, deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Penza region, said the people’s enterprise created in the region seeks to provide affordable goods to the people by cutting out the chain of intermediaries between producers and consumers.

Photo by CPRF regional committee press service

“After the presentation of Zyuganov’s 10 headnotes during the Orel economic forum, we intensified our work on creating a people’s enterprise here in our region. It was clear for us that creating something similar to the ‘Zvenigovsky’ agricultural holding or the Lenin state owned farm from scratch would be impossible. That would require years of hard work and colossal investment. We needed to seek other forms. We ended up choosing a consumer cooperative for that,” the leader of Penza Communists said in his speech on creation of the people’s enterprise during the 10th joint plenum of the CPRF Central Committee and the Central Control and Revision Committee held in the Moscow region on Saturday, March 26.

The consumer price for each good can be reduced immediately by cutting out the chain of intermediaries – chain stores and markets, he pointed out.

According to Georgy Kamnev, this is particularly important in the times when a significant part of population has to buy less food to save money.

“The sociologists say that 64% of Russians feel concern over growing food and essential goods prices. This issue recently went ahead, surpassing the fears of job loss and poverty. These fears have substantial basis behind them. Over the year of 2015, the main foods, medicine, communal bills and essential goods grew in price by 31.6%,” said the first secretary of the CPRF regional committee.

According to research, the products to increase in price the most on their way to the store shelves are carrots (+195%), potatoes (+160%), buckwheat (+135%), milk (+91%), cabbage (+73%) and beef (+51%), he stressed.

“The retail margin in the Soviet sales system remained under 8%. Modern store chains see it fit to get 30-50% of the product price for themselves. They are simply mooching off of people, gaining enormous profits by exploiting their market dominance,” Georgy Kamnev pointed out.

He also suggested to include retail margin fixation in the list of demands of the Communist Party.