In the trade war that Ukraine has declared against Poland, we are not only against the local oligarchs, but also against powerful interest groups from all over the world.
Since Ukraine filed a complaint against Poland, Hungary and Slovakia with the World Trade Organization, we are dealing with a regular trade war. Although Poland has provided and continues to provide enormous assistance to Ukraine, without which the country would have long since disappeared from the political map of Europe, President Volodymyr Zelensky even allowed himself to post a comment on the X platform suggesting that we, by defending our farmers are actually allies of Russia. There are many opinions that the step taken by our neighbors is only a kind of scare and a starting point for long negotiations, but the truth is that the nature of Polish and Ukrainian agriculture by definition makes our interests contradictory, because the scale of production , The high quality of the land and the much lower costs provide our neighboring country with a significant competitive advantage – especially when Polish agriculture is tied to the EU regulatory network. Even though in our domestic agricultural sector we are experiencing the consolidation of small farms that every year turn into large-scale enterprises, we are still far from concentrating production at the Ukrainian level, where, moreover, the capital of oligarchs and international financiers dominate.
Wild fields of privatization
The size of Ukrainian agricultural holdings can best be appreciated by the fact that the largest of them controls an area equal to more than three times the entire Kłodzko Valley. The next seven largest agribusinesses also cover a larger area than the charming country in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship. This is not the end, because the largest company in Poland engaged in the cultivation of agricultural land has, according to “Tygodnik Rolniczy”, about 8,000 hectares at its disposal. ha. In Ukraine it would be difficult to be among the 100 largest landowners, because the average area of a local agroholding is estimated at about 4.8 thousand. ha. On the one hand, the size of today’s Ukrainian latifundia should not be surprising, as Ukraine is almost twice the size of Poland, but contemporary Ukrainian elites have done much to ensure that perhaps the greatest natural wealth of this land came into the hands of the few and the most corrupt. After Ukraine became independent in 1991, a privatization campaign was carried out, with the country theoretically falling into the hands of a group of former collective farms numbering as many as 8 million people. However, the issued certificates authorizing the acquisition of land were taken over en masse by oligarchs, and so a moratorium on the transfer of land titles was introduced in 2001.
Source: Do Rzeczy
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
