The Ukrainian Council of Ministers has banned Ukrainian lawmakers from travelling to Poland amid an ongoing row over grain imports, Onet reported on Tuesday, in a move Ukrainian MPs are calling ‘illegal’.
With the EU’s embargo on selected Ukrainian agricultural and food products due to expire on 15 September, Poland, one of the countries that has suffered badly from excessive imports from Ukraine, is calling for it to be extended and threatening to take unilateral action.
“They refuse to let me out. I want to go (to Poland), but they won’t let me cross the border (…) because of the illegal decision by the Ukrainian Council of Ministers not to let the lawmakers out,” MP Mykola Knyazhycki, who was supposed to participate in the Economic Forum in Karpacz that started on Tuesday, told Onet.
Knyazhycki is not the only lawmaker who has reportedly been forced to cancel his trips to Karpacz because of the government’s decision, according to sources close to the forum. “There have been several resignations in recent days,” the sources said.
Exemptions include official trips of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, NATO-related visits or official invitations, Ukraine’s Ambassador to Poland Vasyl Zvarych told Onet. He did not clearly confirm that the ban is in place, nor did he dispel the reports.
He also said that he hopes there will be no new bans on Ukrainian agri-food imports and that prolonging the current embargo would be “hard to accept” for Kyiv.
Although the discussion in the EU concerns mainly grain, other imports from Ukraine also hit the domestic production in Poland, including the uncontrolled inflow of frozen cheap soft fruit, especially raspberries and of apple juice, of which Poland is the world’s second-largest exporter.
Polish farmers cannot compete with Ukraine in food production, as several plant protection products that are banned from the EU are widely used in Ukraine, which makes the production much cheaper, Mirosław Maliszewski, head of the Association of Polish Fruit Growers, told EURACTIV.pl earlier this year.
According to him, once Ukraine integrates into the EU, some transition periods will have to be imposed on Ukrainian food products before they can enter the bloc’s market under the same rules as products from the “old” member states.
Ukraine will also have to adopt the same rules for food production as the whole bloc before it joins the EU, Maliszewski believes.
(Aleksandra Krzysztoszek | EURACTIV.pl)
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