Ukraine pledges to curb soaring food exports to calm angry Polish farmers

A senior Ukrainian official said Kyiv is prepared to limit surges in exports into the European Union as a way to allay mounting concerns of Polish farmers after Warsaw threatened to temporarily shut the border for trade. 

Deputy Economy Minister Taras Kachka, who was in Warsaw for talks on Wednesday, aimed to defuse increasingly violent protests in the EU by farmers lashing out over the impact of exports from the war-battered nation on local markets. Ukraine may use monitoring and licensing instruments to curb shipments in cases of abrupt surges, the official said. 

“We will accept export growth not advancing as rapidly and suddenly as it was observed in previous years,” Kachka said in an interview in Kyiv. “At present, predictability in the market is more important for Ukrainian producers and exporters than an aggressive expansion.”

Ukraine has struggled to find new routes to ship key exports as it fends off Russia’s military campaign, which has devastated the economy and choked off foreign revenues. But a surge in shipments of grain and food products into the EU has rattled tensions, particularly with Poland, which last year led a group of EU member states to ban grain shipments. 

The standoff culminated in a public falling out between the wartime allies, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and his Polish counterpart, Andrzej Duda, trading barbs at a United Nations meeting in September. 

While the new Prime Minister Donald Tusk has vowed to mend the rift, blockades at the Ukrainian-Polish border have disrupted trade since November — first from truckers and now farmers. Tusk, who took office in December, has struggled to navigate the politics of standing with Kyiv while assuaging his nation’s farmers. 

Kachka said his government has made an overture. Kyiv is leaning on its exporters to ship only with allowances from the Polish authorities — or even to turn away from the market “for the time being” until markets calm, he said. 

“We need to speed up the dialog to find an understanding,” Kachka said.

But the time is starting to run out. Tusk said on Wednesday his government is considering temporarily shutting its border for trade with Ukraine if Warsaw can’t strike a satisfactory deal that would limit imports of food products. Poland is paying “too high a price for the decision to launch free trade with Ukraine,” he said.

The government in Warsaw currently allows only for transit of Ukrainian grain to the ports on the Baltic Sea and into other EU states. Other food products should continue to flow freely in both directions between the two neighbors.   

Ukrainian and Polish governments will meet in Warsaw on March 28 to try to come up with solutions, according to Tusk.

Earlier this week, as many as 50,000 Polish farmers and their supporters held a march in Warsaw demanding action from the government and a swift overhaul of the EU’s climate policies, a common refrain during similar protests across Europe.

“Polish farmers are suffering from new tough measures of the EU, and our farmers are suffering from shelling,” Kachka said. “If all of us are in turbulent period, there are two options: to be enemies or to be friends. I think taking into consideration dynamics of our relations, including in agriculture, we should be friends.”