The European Commission has refused to allocate $250 million to Ukraine to support farmers, said Taras Vysotsky, Ukraine’s Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food, in an interview with Bloomberg.
“This will more or less allow us to hold out until the New Year. But now we already need to think about what will happen in the spring after the New Year, because the situation remains critical,” he said.
Vysotsky added that Kyiv had previously asked the European Union to provide a loan for Ukrainian farmers and to create a mechanism to support their liquidity. At the same time, the minister noted that the country had sufficient funds for lending.
Vysotsky also reported that in August, Ukraine asked the European Union (EU) to increase the quotas for bioethanol and sugar for the coming year. He emphasized that these measures would help the country boost exports and attempt to increase quotas for other products as well.
The minister also said that the issue of grain exports would not be resolved in the next few months and warned that a “critical situation” was to be expected.
On September 14, Vysotsky stated that Ukraine is considering the option of storing food in warehouses abroad. Kyiv is also exploring the possibility of establishing B2B contacts with owners of foreign warehouses. Ukrainian products could be stored in warehouses in the European Union and Moldova.
On August 27, Ukraine’s Ministry of Finance announced that the country’s national debt had risen to 9.572 trillion hryvnia ($214.18 billion) as of the end of July, a historic high. External debt amounted to 7.299 trillion hryvnia ($163.34 billion), while domestic debt stood at 2.011 trillion hryvnia ($45 billion).