This year, Yamal will spend 782 million rubles in reindeer-breeding subsidies, reports the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area website. It is hoped that the program will boost the output of reindeer-breeding farms, regardless of their property status, and expand the regional processing industry.

"For us, adequate state support for the reindeer-breeding sector is an important condition of its wellbeing in the current situation. Yamal sees this as one of the most important parts of financing the regional agro-industrial complex. We are steering toward the intensive development of the industry, staking on in-depth processing, technical and production innovation," Alexei Sitnikov, First Deputy Governor of the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area, told delegates at the 4^th Congress of Russian Reindeer-Breeders that opened in Yakutsk on March 16.

Sitnikov also noted that the autonomous area planned to submit a number of industry-rationalization proposals to various federal agencies, and that these proposals might prove useful to all Russian reindeer-breeding regions. They call for identifying all reindeer, processing reindeer antlers and endocrine-ferment feedstock and also including the profession of a housewife (tent-keeper) among other worker professions.