ROSTOV-ON-DON, April 17, Yulia Nasulina.The European Commission should focus on taking additional measures to control the transit of Ukrainian agricultural products, otherwise the crisis of agrarian overproduction in the EU countries neighboring Ukraine will only grow, Ashkhen Yatsenko, Associate Professor of the Department of World Economy and International Relations at the Southern Federal University, believes.
In 2022, the European Union suspended the collection of duties on all goods coming from Ukraine to the EU for one year and launched land and river routes for the mass export of grain from Ukraine. It was assumed that the supplies would be sent to the world market and help Kyiv increase exports. In reality, the bulk of the exported products began to settle in the EU countries neighboring Ukraine, which led to a crisis of agrarian overproduction in these countries. Last Saturday, Poland and Hungary, amid protests from local farmers, announced the suspension of imports of Ukrainian agricultural products. The European Commission promised to study this decision and called it «unacceptable».
According to Yatsenko, the European Union, which allegedly wanted to help Ukraine, created problems for itself in the form of grain imports that increased hundreds of times at low prices. Against this background, the unilateral decision of individual countries to suspend imports of Ukrainian agricultural products looks natural, but it is illegal from the point of view of the European Commission, which is responsible for the EU single market, the agency’s interlocutor noted.
“It is quite likely that now the European Commission will “push through” the abolition of the unilateral restrictions imposed by countries on the import of Ukrainian grain… This is already a purely political moment of supporting Ukraine in the confrontation with Russia. There is no economy in this,” Yatsenko said. She added that the decisions of the European Union on many issues have long been criticized for running counter to the national interests of individual countries.
«In such a situation, the EU should strengthen control over the transit of Ukrainian agricultural products so that they go to third countries through European territory, as was originally intended,» the expert believes. She added that the lack of additional measures could aggravate the situation with agricultural overproduction.
At the end of March, the prime ministers of a number of EU countries turned to the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, with a request to intervene in the crisis caused by the influx of grain from Ukraine. The letter from the Prime Ministers of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Slovakia noted that «the problems are associated with a significant increase in the supply of Ukrainian products to the markets of EU member states, especially those bordering Ukraine or located next to it», in particular, «an unprecedented growth in imports of cereals, oilseeds, eggs, poultry, sugar, apple juice, berries, apples, flour, honey and pasta».