Farms: Ripe economy: Meet the Russian farmers benefiting from the ban on Western produce

At a strawberry farm in Kaliningrad Oblast, workers are busy picking ripe fruit to sell to locals during the summer. It's a sight that has become a lot more common in Russia over the past year. The Russian exclave, sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland, used to get up to 90% of its food products from abroad. But in July 2014, the Russian government imposed an embargo on EU and US food produce in retaliation for Western economic sanctions over the country's involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Now, a year on, local farmers in Russia are benefiting. "Before then, our produce was not in demand. But after the counter-sanctions, all the local shop chains as well as the majority of people turned around towards us and started to buy our produce with big success," says Shaig Memedov, a strawberry farmer based in Kaliningrad Oblast., head over to http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/tv