News From Agro-Industrial Complex

Yesterday, March 8, the leadership of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine met with a delegation from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

The parties discussed the current situation in Ukraine's agricultural sector and its priority needs. They focused on the need to ensure liquidity of the agricultural market, implementation of an irrigation reform and solving the problem of demining of agricultural land.

Yesterday, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced three new partnerships to help Ukraine overcome immediate and long-term export logistics challenges caused by Russia’s full-scale war. USAID, Grain Alliance, Kernel, and Nibulon plan to make combined investments of more than $44 million to support storage and infrastructure expansion in Ukraine’s agriculture sector. The investments are projected to increase Ukraine’s grain shipping capacity by more than 3.35 million tons annually, bolstering Ukraine’s economy and bringing much-needed grain to the global market.

When Ukraine recaptured Kherson in November, Andrii Povod returned to find his grain farm in ruins. Two tractors were missing, most of the wheat was gone and all 11 buildings used to store crops and machinery had been bombed and burned.

The farm bears the scars of Russian shelling and unexploded ordnance riddles the fields but it's the less visible damage to Ukraine's famously fertile soil after a year of war that could be the hardest to repair.

In the eleven months of 2022, there was an increase in the export volume of onion from Poland. In accordance with the Ministry of Finance preliminary data, from January to November 2022, 189 thousand tonnes of onion were exported from Poland, by 42% more than in the comparable period of 2021, mainly as a result of a significant (24-fold) increase in the export of onion to Ukraine (54 thousand tonnes, 28% of the export volume).