30m Russians interested in Far East land handout , claim pollsters

Vacant Siberian farmland

Around 30 million  (mainly young ) Russians, would move thousands of miles to take advantage of the governments’s Far East land handout, according to a poll conducted by the VTSIOM market research company.
The poll took place on the eve of a public discussion about Moscow’s plan to give away one-hectare plots of land in Russia’s Far Easter territories –  a radical attempt to reverse a potentially catastrophic population decline in the country’s Pacific Rim and to effect a sixfold increase in inhabitants from 6.4m to 36m.
Under the terms of the scheme, Russians would be offered land that could be use for farming, forestry or simply for smallholdings. Anybody taking up the offer would be able to sell the plot once they had lived on it and developed it for a period of five years.
Some 28% of those surveyed said they wanted to organise individual self-sufficient homesteads on their land; 19% said they would like to become farmers while 16% said that the land grants was an opportunity for them to change their place of residence, said the press service of the Ministry for Far Eastern Development.