The present paper focuses on key problems and specifics of ensuring food security and on state of agro-industrial complexes in different countries of the world. The authors defined the main aspects of state support for agriculture in advanced foreign economies and specified the challenges of food security ensuring. Agriculture is such an industry that brings prosperity to those who can work efficiently and make right decisions under high uncertainty, which may imply unsteady weather conditions, market environment, various production risks. Successful development of agriculture requires the ability to forecast and prevent unfavorable situations. In all countries, the main objective of agricultural production is to fully meet population’s demand for food using its own resources for manufacturing necessary food products. However, some countries do not have their own resources for agriculture, so they have to import finished products and raw materials for food production from other countries. For today, ensuring food security for all countries of the world is one of the most urgent problems of the mankind. Since the United Nations (the UN) was created, the international community has been paying close attention to the shortage of food. The issues of customs tariff regulation, plant and animal health care, administrative barriers – these are the priority tasks demanding systemic approaches, the fulfillment of which will stimulate the breakthrough inagriculture.

Correctional influence on juvenile convicts is one of the priorities of the penitentiary system of the Russian Federation. Even though there is a trend for a reduction in the level of juvenile crimes in Russia, new approaches to their prevention are needed. The effectiveness of correctional influence directly depends on the systemic and complex character of its implementation. It is necessary to take into account the criminological characteristics of the analyzed category of convicts, which will make it possible to fully and accurately determine key trends of preventing repeat offences by juveniles and of helping their re-socialization. This work should be based on data that objectively reflect the characteristics of inmates in educational penal colonies. One of the fundamental ways of obtaining objective data is a census. The goal of this research was to carry out a census of all underage inmates in the penitentiary institutions in October 2019, to collect information on the criminological characteristics of minors, to identify the trends for their changes and to use the obtained information in the preventive work with them. The authors studied all inmates (1 214 people) in all 23 penitentiary institutions for juvenile delinquents in Russia. Research results were used to create a generalized criminological portrait of a juvenile inmate. It is a male person (91,5 %), 16-17 years of age (67,3 %) who lived in an urban area prior to conviction (58,4 %), studied in a comprehensive secondary school (72,0 %), lived in a dysfunctional or socially vulnerable family (86,6 %; single-parent family - 40,4 %), who has borderline psychiatric (48,3 %) or drug-related (16,2 %) disorders (they do not impair sanity, but influence the mechanisms of deviant behavior), who has no work experience (89,6 %), no prior convictions (67,9 %) for intentional very grave crimes (50,2 %), mostly committed without accomplices. Only 8 % claim that they respect the traditions of criminal subculture and want to be professional criminals in the future. In almost half of the cases (48,4 %), the imprisonment sentence does not exceed 3 years. The obtained results can be used to improve the practice of preventive work with juvenile delinquents, their re-socialization and the future development of criminology.

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The authors discuss the problem of developing the self-efficacy of penitentiary systems employees. It is an urgent problem because this personal meta-quality of Russian penitentiary systems employees has not been studied sufficiently. At the same time, according to available research, a high level of self-efficacy makes it possible even for a moderately gifted person to achieve significant results. The paper presents the results of an empirical study carried out by the authors in 2018. They surveyed 117 penitentiary systems employees with the purpose of researching their self-efficacy, identifying its connection with life orientations and motivation for achievements (aspirations). The aim of the study was the verification of the hypothesis that certain psychological characteristics of employees hinder the development of their self-efficacy - inadequate motivation for achievements (aspirations) and insufficient awareness of the meaningfulness of life. The verification method for the hypothesis was psychological testing: self-efficacy level methodology by J.E. Maddux and M. Sherer (as modified by A.V. Boyarintseva); «MAS» motivation study methodology by M.L. Kubyshkina; «Life Orientations» test by D.A. Leontyev, as well as methods of mathematical statistics for data processing (comparative analysis using Mann-Whitney U-test, Pearson correlation analysis). It is noted that the surveyed employees have a rather high level of self-efficacy in «substantive activity», while the self-efficiency in «interpersonal communication» is low. The authors present the results of a comparative analysis of data from two groups selected depending on how well this parameter is developed, and on their gender. The correlation data analysis results demonstrated a strong positive correlation between both parameters of self-efficacy - substantive activity and interpersonal communication - with all indicators of the general level of awareness of the meaningfulness of life. The authors conclude that insufficient competence of employees in the sphere of interpersonal communication, competitiveness that increases with age, insufficient awareness of the meaningfulness of some aspects of life hinders the development of their self-efficacy, which is more typical of female employees. The authors also present a structure of the process of improving the self-efficacy of penitentiary systems employees.

The results of a retrospective study of groups of convicts with varying degrees of aggressive behavior show the possibilities of the Standardized Multifactorial Personality Research Method (SMIL, the Russian version of MMPI), the interpretive approach of which is based on the one created by L.N. Sobchik theory of leading trends in assessing the degree of aggressiveness corresponding to the severity of the committed act. The leading tendencies, according to the average profiles of SMIL, are determined: among "hooligans" impulsivity with weakly expressed aggressiveness and unformed self-control; the "robbers" have rigidity, readiness for illegal behavior; in "killers" the severity of aggressiveness (in the hyperthymic type, explosive features and properties of expansive-schizoid accentuation; in the hypersthenic type, exaltation, overestimated self-esteem, an outwardly blaming type of response; in persons with impulse pathology, a partial violation in the sexual sphere with preserved intelligence); for “corrupt officials”: the profile is in the corridor of normative dispersion, but self-esteem and ideas about their own material well-being are directly proportional; in minors, aggression acts as a hypercompensation of an insecure personality with pseudo-aggressive actions.