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The world's largest exhibition for the food and agro-industrial sector was held in Berlin from 15 to 24 January. Each year Russia rents the largest pavilion available, covering 6,000 m2. Interest in International Green Week has not slackened over the years: each January the huge exhibition centre at Messe Berlin is regularly attended by around half a million visitors. We too set out to pick our way through the labyrinth of stands and opinions. Despite the cold spell, one unusually bitter for Berlin, long queues of Berliners keen to try out products from different corners of the world were drawing towards the ticket office.

In 2010, the seventy-fifth Green Week was held. Hungary was the exhibition’s guest of honour. During a press breakfast held at the Hungarian stand on 16 January, the minister of agriculture Jozsef Graf was present. The gathered journalists were offered modest fare: coffee, rolls and two types of salami. The minister gave a brief report, in 15 minutes outlining the key trends of his department’s activity and the sector as a whole. “Germany is the number one market for Hungary’s agricultural industry,” the official press release emphasised. Accompanying it was a DVD “Treasures of Hungary” with a subheading in Russian. So the Russian market has not been forgotten in Hungary — here you have an example of the correct approach to building business communications in the modern world.

Venison westward!

Russia is traditionally one of Germany’s major trading partners. For instance, in the sphere of agricultural machinery supplies, in 2008 the Russian Federation came second after France in terms of sales volumes. We met the press officer for Green Week Wolfgang Rogall and asked him about the relationship between the exhibition’s organisers and their Russian partners. “Over the last decade Russia has become the biggest exhibitor in our entire history,” Mr Rogall remarked. “People go to the Russian pavilion because this country always exhibits traditional specialities. For example, an ordinary person would simply never be able to find here the products on show at the Yamalo-Nenets stand.” What products are these? We made a beeline for the stand.

Sergey Grishin, director of the Yamalo-Nenets regional museum and exhibition complex and the manager for the stand, said that on 15 January “a contract was signed here between the firm Yamal Deer, from our region, who deal with the processing of reindeer husbandry production, and the German company Brodersen & Köver, concerning the supply of reindeer meat to the German market”. It is already the second such contract, the first having been signed last year. In 2010 more than 300 tonnes of venison will be delivered to Germany, Scandinavia and Greece. For Russia the conclusion of such contracts is a strategic priority. This was most likely the reason why the meeting of the German Minister for Agriculture Ilse Aigner with her Russian colleague Yelena Skrynnik and deputy prime minister Viktor Zubkov took place on the opening day of Green Week at the Yamalo-Nenets stand. What a shame we arrived late for the venison sandwich tasting and had to be content with a folk ensemble.

Russian traditions at Green Week

It seems that the Russian pavilion’s traditional specialities include the fact that from year to year the public is entertained here in the same old hoary “pop folk” style. The performers are wonderful, their professionalism is up to scratch — nobody is arguing over that. Yet sometimes one gets the feeling that the organisers of the Russian presentations think rather less about pleasing the Berlin public and are more concerned with what would look good in their reports to their superiors. This year what struck the eye was the noticeably smaller number of visitors attending the enormous Russian pavilion as compared with other pavilions. At one point from a specially constructed stage there burst out a choir from Krasnodar. People put their hands over their ears against the blaring sound, and no more than twenty spectators stood at the stage. The thought occurred: benches and tables should be put out here, the visitors could enjoy some Russian cuisine, and from the stage you could have a flow of unobtrusive, pleasant music, not necessarily in the folk spirit. And the public would have crammed in, as they were seen to do in many of the other pavilions at Green Week.

Some stands did not even have promotional material in German, let alone English. As if the unspoken assumption was that one need merely arrive in Berlin, and there everyone would read about the volume of gross output and features of the Russian countryside in Russian. Such cases, nevertheless, were exceptions. The Tomsk region delighted everyone with its presentation of Dark & Black beer, and also a grocery range called World of Health, where products made from sea-buckthorn berries and cedar nuts attracted special attention. At the stand for Moscow and the Moscow Region, 14 different firms from the area were presented. We talked to the director of the company Ozyorskie Raznosoly, which supplies organic vegetable and mushroom conserves not only to Europe, but also to the USA. The owner of the company Mikhail Levkin said that due to the crisis European buyers prefer to buy cheap mushrooms from China, rather than Russia’s mushrooms which are high grade but twice as expensive. What can be done to lower the price? Or, perhaps, rather than lowering price, how can their products be targeted at a more affluent audience? This is the future challenge. Perhaps we will find out the answers in next year’s Russian pavilion at Green Week.