MOSCOW, March 24. /TASS/. The EU’s possible refusal to extend emergency trade measures that lifted duties and quotas on Ukrainian agriculture exports, will have damaging consequences for Kiev, Ukrainian finance minister Sergey Marchenko said.
"The European Union is our key trade partner, and that’s why it would be really damaging for us if we [found] ourselves in a situation which we had before the war," the Financial Times quoted him as saying.
According to government data, Ukraine’s revenues from exports to the EU under the "autonomous trade measures" accounted for almost a tenth of the country’s $41 bln export revenue in 2024, the newspaper wrote. Those flows could be at risk if the EU does not renew the measures, which are due to expire on June 5, 2025, in time.
"Ukraine needs to clearly understand the further conditions of access to the EU market," Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food of Ukraine Vitaly Koval told the publication.
Politico said earlier citing sources that certain EU countries, including Poland and France, were against extension of the duty-free trade regulation on supplies of Ukrainian agriculture production to the European Union. The EU might not extend the regulation amid farmers’ protests inside the Union as European products are becoming non-competitive due to cheap Ukrainian goods, according to the paper.
An agreement on a deep and comprehensive free trade area has been in force between the European Union and Ukraine since 2016. However, as experts note, the need for special decisions to abolish all quotas and tariffs for a limited period shows that the so-called free trade regime over the past nine years has not prevented the EU from maintaining tariffs on significant volumes of Ukrainian exports. That said, the EU countries have had virtually unlimited access to the Ukrainian market all this time. The European Union cancelled duties on Ukrainian exports to the EU for one year starting June 4, 2022, though later it extended the incentive.
Earlier, agriculture ministers of Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia asked the European Commission to cancel increased quotas on agriculture products from Ukraine and oblige Ukrainian companies to maintain EU market standards.