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Ukrainian agriculture could lose 10B roubles a year if associated with EU - source

MOSCOW, December 05. /ITAR-TASS/. Losses of Ukraine’s agricultural producers could be ten billion roubles a year, if the country signed the agreement with the EU, while the Customs Union may give to them additional revenues of billions of roubles, Russia’s minister of agriculture Nikolai Fedorov said on Wednesday.

The Russian Federation and Ukraine have a rather big trade turnover in agriculture, he said.

“As Ukraine considered the association with the European Union, we analysed the figure of their possible losses, and those losses could be rather big - up to ten billion roubles a year,” the minister said.

At the same time, should Ukraine join the Customs Union of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus, Ukrainian agricultural producers could receive reasonable revenues.

“That could be quite a growth, however not dozens of billions, but still billions,” Fedorov said.

The minister said Ukraine might sell rather successfully at the Customs Union’s markets its dairy, meet and caramel products, adding though the Russian producers were, surely, not very happy about growing competition.

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