Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced on Saturday the ban on importing grain and other Ukrainian agricultural products. A “difficult” decision was made to protect the interests of the Polish agricultural sector.
Poland has decided to ban the import of grain and dozens of other agricultural products from Ukraine, the president of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party announced on Saturday, claiming that this decision is intended to prevent a crisis in the sector.
It is a “difficult decision”, but necessary to protect the interests of the Polish agricultural sector, acknowledged Jaroslaw Kaczynski, at a PiS convention in the city of Lyse, ensuring that the measure does not diminish support for Ukraine in the context of the war. caused by the Russian invasion. .
Polish farmers have complained that a large part of Ukrainian cereals and other products are not distributed in the rest of the European Union (EU), but remain in the country, causing prices to collapse.
The decision was made on the basis of the “asymmetry between Polish and Ukrainian agriculture”, due, among other factors, to the different quality of the land and the lower price of labor in Ukraine, which would lead, if not restrict imports, to a deep crisis in the Polish agricultural sector, justified Kaczynski.
He added that the Ukrainian government had been informed of the ban and that Warsaw was ready to start negotiations in the coming days with Kiev on a bilateral agreement to resolve the issue, which he attributed to the European decision to suspend tariffs on Ukrainian goods.
The Polish Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, Robert Telus, defended that the European Union (EU) must take urgent measures to distribute at a European level the Ukrainian products that flood the Polish market.
“The EU uses nice words, but the assets remain in our country, in the vanguard countries,” lamented the official, in statements quoted by the Polish agency PAP, when defending that the cost of aid to Ukraine “should fall on all of Europe and not only of Polish farmers”.
The Ministry of Agriculture said in a statement that the Cabinet had granted authorization to issue decrees protecting the Polish agricultural market against possible destabilization, including a temporary ban on the import of Ukrainian agricultural products.
The kyiv government hopes to “resolve next week” the issue of the suspension of exports of agricultural products to Poland.
The Ukrainian Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food, Mykola Solskyi, said that his executive understands the difficult situation in which the Polish market finds itself, after the lifting of tariffs on Ukrainian production by the European Commission.
Solskyi said he would travel to Poland on Monday to meet his counterpart, Robert Telus, who took office last week after his predecessor, Henryk Kowalczyk, resigned over protests by Polish farmers over the plight of the market.
The export of cereals from Ukrainian ports has been one of the main, and practically unique, agreements reached between Russia and Ukraine which, with the mediation of the United Nations, managed to approve a plan to ship cereals from the Black Sea in 2022.
Source: Observadora
