The vision of a column of tractors of angry farmers has a spectacular effect on the political commitments of the countries of the European Union, and particularly of the French and the Poles. After pushing to revise community commitments in environmental matters, the fear of an agricultural uprising is pushing these two countries, and a few others, to also review their promises to Ukraine.
On Wednesday March 20, member states and the European Parliament agreed on a cap on duty-free entry of Ukrainian agricultural products (chicken, eggs, corn, sugar, oats, honey, cereals, etc.). Beyond 2022-2023 production, they will be taxed as before. As compensation, a new tax will affect grain imports from Russia and Belarus.
These new provisions, already deemed insufficient by the French Minister of Agriculture, should come into force on June 6 on the occasion of the renewal of the free trade agreement concluded with Ukraine in the context of the war. Aid to a devastated economy has limits, that of competition which European farmers criticize all the more since they believe that their counterparts benefit too greatly from external financial aid. Thus, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) has granted nearly 890 million euros in loans since 2022 to producers, exporters and importers in the Ukrainian agri-food sector. Unfair competition ?
“Our funding is not donations”
” Reality is more complex, replies Odile Renaud-Basso, president of the EBRD. The shock on the prices of agricultural raw materials after the start of the war demonstrated that the world needs Ukrainian producers. We help them export to other global markets and we also support agribusiness in the European countries where we invest. Furthermore, our funding is not donations. These are loans at market rates. »
This rather discreet institution, created in 1991 under French leadership to help the development of Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is projected under the media spotlight. It must be said that although it is much smaller than the European Investment Bank or the World Bank, in the space of two years it has become the leading institutional lender to Ukrainian companies. A way of supporting the country’s war effort.
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