BERLIN, January 16. /TASS/. Russia and Germany may expand mutual trade in food products in the framework of the current laws, Russian and German Agriculture Ministers, Nikolai Fyodorov and Christian Schmidt said on Friday after their talks on the sidelines of the International Green Week public exhibition for the food, agriculture, and gardening industry in the German capital.
“We cannot solve pressing political problems, but we can maintain dialogue in the current conditions,” the German minister said. “We can make trade between our countries more intensive.”
The Russian minister shared this opinion saying, the Berlin exhibitions was a “non-political event working on problems of food security.”
“We discussed possible expansion of cooperation and mutual trade in agricultural products and agreed to work in the new conditions strictly within the frameworks of the current legislation of Russia, the Customs Union, Germany and the European Union,” Fyodorov said.
“The dialogue was intensive and concrete, we spoke about how we can develop our cooperation,” Schmidt told journalists.
Earlier on Friday, the German minister took part in the opening ceremony of the Russian pavilion at the exhibition.
Ahead of the International Green Week, the German mass media reported that Schmidt planned to raise the subject of possible mitigation of Russia’s food sanctions at his meeting with his Russian counterpart.
According to the Russian ministry of agriculture, German exports of foods to Russia have dropped by 23%, or 500 million U.S. dollars, since August 2014, when Russia imposed a package of measures to respond to economic sanction from the United States, Australia, Canada, the European Union and Norway. Thus, Russia banned for a term of one year the imports of fruit, vegetables, milk and dairy products from these countries. Some types of ready-to-eat meat and fish products (with the exception of sausages) have not fallen under the ban.