The European Union does not plan to restrict imports from Ukraine despite farmers' complaints
The European Union is not considering the option of introducing previously canceled tariffs on Ukrainian agricultural products, despite the negative impact on farmers in some countries. European Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski stated this at the results of the Council of EU Ministers in Brussels at the beginning of the week, writes "Evropeyska Pravda".
The main topic of the meeting was the situation on the agricultural market against the background of the war in Ukraine. Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia presented reports on the consequences of increased imports of agricultural products from Ukraine for the producers of these countries.
Wojciechovsky reported that the import of wheat from Ukraine to the EU increased by an order of magnitude: from 287,000 tons in 2021 to 2.8 million tons in 2022. The volume of Ukrainian corn imported into the European Union has almost doubled — from 7.3 million tons in 2021 to 12 million tons in 2022.
But the most dramatic increase in the import of sunflower seeds from Ukraine into the EU was found: in 2021, this figure was only 25,000 tons, and in 2022, it will already be 1.8 million tons. For example, 3,000 tons of this product were supplied to Bulgaria from Ukraine before the war, and 892,000 tons after the full-scale Russian invasion.
The Council of the EU decided that to solve this problem it is necessary to take measures at the level of the European Union.
At the same time, there were no proposals to stop or limit imports from Ukraine. It is about helping farmers, not about barriers or a ban on the import of goods from Ukraine. None of the representatives of EU countries spoke about this," the European Commissioner emphasized.
In late May 2022, the European Union launched the "Solidarity Lanes" initiative to help Ukraine export agricultural goods via all possible routes — including rail, road and river transport — amid disruptions caused by the Russian war.
Although the "solidarity lanes" were created to facilitate transport through neighboring countries such as Romania to wider EU and global markets, farmers from these countries have repeatedly warned that large volumes of grain are getting stuck in border regions, where they push local producers out of the market . For example, in September, Romanian grain producers warned that the influx of Ukrainian grain through the "solidarity strip" initiative was putting them on the verge of bankruptcy.