Abstract
Purpose - the article is devoted to identifying the needs of the economy of Kazakhstan in infrastructure facilities for storing agricultural products and the prospects for its further development. Methods - statistical, factorial and k-mean cluster analysis. Results - the influence of an efficiently functioning network of storage facilities for agricultural products on the stability of providing the population with food, reducing the volatility of prices and supplies in the off-season is justified. The authors revealed that modern premises for warehousing and preserving the quality of agricultural products in foreign countries combine the functions of storage and marketing by creating logistics wholesale distribution centers (WDC), which allow the use of modern information technologies and computer systems aimed to form consumer applications for formulating commodity groups and delivery of the required product volumes to the consumer with minimal costs. Based on the analysis of indicators of harvesting and use of the main types of agricultural products in the republic (stocks at the beginning of the year, gross harvest, imports, industrial use and domestic consumption, losses, exports, personal consumption by the population, reserves at the end of the year, availability of storage facilities, shortage), the need in the storage infrastructure has been determined. The clustering of warehouse buildings was carried out according to the main features: the volume of one-time preservation, level of losses, availability of climatic warehouses and transport mechanism, on the basis of which five clusters have been identified. Conclusions - cluster analysis of storages showed their uneven and irrigation distribution across the regions of the country. It is necessary to modernize and build new such facilities of various capacities on the basis of the WDC - large hubs concentrated in various regions of Kazakhstan, depending on their needs.