Penza, 23 October 2015. PenzaNews. The harvest in the Penza region is 97% complete, announced Andrei Burlakov, acting deputy chairman of the regional government, during the October 23 press conference held in the PenzaNews agency press center on Friday.

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“On the present day, we have 20,000 more hectares of corn ready for harvest, but this is a late-season crop, for seeds. All cattle food corn has already been harvested,” he clarified.

According to Andrei Burlakov, the agrarians are also yet to harvest some 6,000 hectares of sugar beet and about 10,000 hectares of sunflowers.

“We will produce more sugar than a year ago. Last year it was 190,000 tons, this year we planned to make it 200,000 tons,” he said, pointing out that the expected volume is 205 to 210 thousand tons.

Andrei Burlakov also mentioned the forecasts saying that 2015 will be the first year for Russia to reach the self-sustainability level, which is a step towards getting rid of sugar import dependency.