Poland and Ukraine have reached an agreement to reopen the border and allow the transit of grain through Polish territory from Friday. The pact comes four days after Poland’s sudden decision to ban imports and passage of Ukrainian agricultural products from April 15. The new Polish Agriculture Minister, Robert Telus, however, made it clear that the ban on imports remains. The European Commission, which is trying to alleviate the tensions of the grain crisis to plug the fracture, assures that it is already working on “different instruments” to uncover the bottlenecks that are causing Ukrainian products not to continue on their way to third countries .
“We have managed to create a mechanism to ensure that not a single ton of grain remains in Poland,” Telus said after two days of negotiations in Warsaw in statements collected by Reuters. In order to guarantee that all the grain that enters the country leaves, the minister explained that for a time the customs and tax services will escort the transport to the border or to the Polish ports. The head of Agriculture also announced the installation of seals with a GPS system, “which will allow precise tracking of transport.” The temporary veto on cereals, meat, milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables remains in force for now until June 30.
Polish farmers, who have been warning of the problem for months and weeks out protesting with tractors, say that imports from Ukraine have pushed prices down and reduced their sales. Farmers’ representatives in other countries in the region also report the same problems. For this reason, the prime ministers of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania wrote a letter to the European Commission at the beginning of April demanding compensation, but Warsaw, in the middle of an election year, broke the deck and announced the ban last Saturday. Hungary joined the same day and Slovakia, which points to the presence of pesticides in Ukrainian grain, this Monday. Bulgaria and Romania are considering it as well.
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko, who joined the negotiations with Poland at the last minute, said at the same press conference where she appeared with Telus that Kiev understands farmers’ problems. Svyrydenko assured that she was convinced that the Ukrainian exporters would respect the terms of the transit agreement agreed with Poland.
The usual route for Ukrainian exports is through the Black Sea, but the Russian invasion made it necessary to look for alternatives by land last year, while working on an agreement with the Kremlin mediated by Turkey that would guarantee the safe passage of the grain. Ukraine is now facing the blockade of land transit by some of its main backers for the past year, and again by Russia, which has long boycotted exports. The agreement with Moscow “is at risk of stalling and Russia has once again blocked the inspection of the ships,” Svyrydenko explained. “For us it is extremely important to unblock the transit or Ukraine will be blocked. We cannot, neither we nor our partners, give Russia the opportunity to take advantage of this situation, ”he added.
Poland’s decision has cracked the stalwart support for Ukraine that the Eastern bloc, led by Warsaw, has so far exhibited across the board. The measure is very marked by electoral interests in the field of the ultra-conservative party in Government, Law and Justice (PiS), which this fall is submitted to the polls. The Executive demands more compensation for farmers from Brussels, which has already delivered 56 million euros for Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.
Negotiations with Brussels
The economic vice-president of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis, will meet this Wednesday with representatives of the five countries. While the capitals of the East tighten the rope and demand more financial aid to extinguish the protests of their farmers at home, the community Executive tries to temper their spirits.
Brussels is already analyzing formulas to guarantee that Ukrainian products do not remain in the territories of the affected countries, but only circulate in transit, points out a community source. This could be debatable from a single market point of view, but the European Commission is already slipping that the aim of removing tariffs on grain and other Ukrainian goods a few months after the Kremlin launched the invasion was so that they could better come through of solidarity runners to developing countries and combat the global food crisis.
Dombrovskis spoke this Tuesday at a press conference in Strasbourg of a “notable increase” in products in the countries affected by the grain crisis and has assured that work is already being done on “different instruments” to uncover the bottlenecks it causes that the products do not leave the countries and in detecting and repairing logistic problems. The balance will be on how to restore transit corridors while helping the Ukrainian economy.
The pressure from the eastern neighbors coincides with the start of negotiations to extend the agreement to exempt import tariffs and quotas for Ukrainian products, which was signed on June 4, 2022 to help Ukraine in the context of the Russian invasion. and that Brussels had proposed extending until June 2024.
International trade is an exclusive competence of the EU, but Warsaw argues that there is a provision that allows member states to “introduce restrictions motivated, for example, by public health issues,” as Pawel Jablonski, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, explained on Monday. Foreign. In this case, it would be the presence of pesticides reported by Slovakia.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is very restrictive in its interpretations of the validity of the reasons and “the instruments are subject to proportionality tests”, warns David Kleimann, an expert in legislation and commercial policy of the European Union. Also a researcher at the Bruegel economic think tank, he believes that if the cases went to court, member states would have trouble “justifying the bans convincingly.”
