Rise to non-economic aspects
According to Petrov, Russian agriculture is not limited to the agro-industrial complex — 62 percent of products are grown by the population. And, interestingly, people grow these 62 percent of agricultural products on 2 percent of the land, and the rest of the areas fall into decay.
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But none of the participants of the round table raised this issue, the expert is indignant. No one looked at our economy from the perspective of the needs of the family. Everyone talked only about his enterprise, the catastrophic situation in his industry, about the fall in production, that is, about the loss of his profits. It never occurred to anyone to think about nature, due to which we produce any products and satisfy our needs.
Petrov voices the conclusion he came to after comprehending this fact: members of the business community are so mired in «narrow» current problems that they can no longer free their thoughts in order to rise to an understanding of the non-economic aspects of the economy and agriculture, as, in fact, the reasons for its decline in our country in particular and the world in general.
Russia’s special path
Vasily Petrov states that the economy of any state can be characterized as ecologically creative or ecologically destructive — much depends on what policy the state is guided by in relation to the use of natural resources and what values dominate in society.
The deep cultural and spiritual code of civilization, which is weakly subject to political or economic influence, also influences the national economy. It determines which path society will take: it will give up in favor of material needs, turning more and more to the exploitation of natural resources, as Western civilization preaches; abandon material needs in favor of spiritual needs, as in Eastern civilization. Or it will bring all the advantages of civilizations together: satisfaction of «biological» material needs with a one-time growth of spiritual and cultural needs by increasing the biological productivity of the earth on the basis of new knowledge.
It is the last path that Petrov calls the special path of Russia, exclusively Russian civilization, along which Russian society must follow, increasing first our capabilities, and then all of humanity.
