VLADIVOSTOK, Russia - Russia needs to create its own Asia-Pacific hub to store, process and trade seafood and fish, Agriculture Minister Alexander Tkachev said on Thursday, the latest plan to increase self-reliance and boost growth. Although already the world’s fifth-largest fish producer, Russia suffers from underdeveloped fishing ports and manufacturing infrastructure, poaching, and a lack of investment, relying heavily on processing in other countries. President Vladimir Putin has said he wants the country to move towards greater self-reliance after the West hit Moscow with sanctions over the Ukraine crisis and Russia retaliated by banning most Western foods. “Fish are our hard-currency export, our grain, oil and gas, our national heritage,” Tkachev told the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast. At a time of increasing efforts by Putin to turn to Asia, Tkachev said the current set up for domestic fisheries does not work. “More than one million tonnes of our fish is being processed in Chinese and (South) Korean ports - I think it is totally unacceptable,” he told journalists. Putin’s drive for more economic self-reliance is yet to pay off: Russia faces recession and inflation is at more than 15 percent on the sanctions, the food ban and a weak rouble, making a dent in the president’s ratings. Turning to fisheries seems a natural choice for a country which has about two-thirds of its frontier bounded by water. The wild catch in Russia, which includes fish and seafood, was at around 4.2 million tonnes last year, with the bulk coming from the Far East Basin, according to the Russian state fish watchdog, Rosrybolovstvo. Separately on Thursday, German Gref, chief executive of state-owned Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender, signed a preliminary agreement to create a regional fish exchange on the Pacific island of Sakhalin. He said he was not aware of Tkachev’s proposal for a fish hub in Vladivostok, but said he hoped the two initiatives could complement each other. NO FISH FOR LOCALS The waters off Vladivostok, which Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was inspired to develop by a 1959 visit to San Francisco, have scallops, calamari, octopus and crabs among other seafood and fish. Still, most fresh seafood can be found only at isolated markets, not in stores. A kilo of scallops costs around 1,800 roubles ($27). “This is a bit too high ... even for the middle class,” said Alexander, a taxi driver in Vladivostok. Russians make on average 34,000 roubles a year, according to official data. Tkachev said that a proposed fish hub in Vladivostok should store, process and trade fish and seafood. He estimated the cost of creating the fish hub at between 20 and 40 billion roubles. “Given the crisis, of course, this is big money ... but I think this is our priority,” he said.