Forecasting Organic Consumption Based on Regional Clustering

One of the most important strategic tasks of the agrarian policy of the Russian Federation is to provide the population of the country with high-quality and safe food. They first of all determine the health state of people. This situation is connected with the fact that 70% of harmful substances enter the human body with food. Consumers must be given the opportunity to purchase quality food products grown by organic farms. The organic market in Russia is at the initial stage, so there is a huge shortage of statistics to identify consumption of these products and their statistical records are not included into a separate group of agricultural products. In this regard the authors have developed and tested a methodology for the normative forecast of the potential consumption of organic products based on the clustering of the regions of the Republic of Crimea, which includes six consecutive stages. They combine the use of a complex of marketing and statistical analysis methods implemented in the SPSS environment; mapping using modern GIS technologies with the allocation of geographic information profiles of the region, which allow differentiating the territory of the peninsula in terms of the potential consumption of organic products. The gradation of the limits of potential consumption of these goods is made automatically by means of the method of classification of natural boundaries. The main results obtained in the work include: identification of the amount of money spent by the population on the consumption of organic products; establishment of the limits on growth of potential consumption for a given product in the region; determination of its share and dynamics of the increase in the structure of the total commodity circulation of the peninsula, identification of areas that form potential organic consumption in the Republic of Crimea.