Poland is ready to negotiate with Ukraine on grain – Robert Telus

Poland is ready to engage in a dialogue with Ukraine on grain supplies to the EU. This was stated by the Minister of Agriculture of Poland Robert Telus in a commentary to РАР.

“We are waiting for such negotiations and are ready for such negotiations to take place. We want to help Ukraine with transit, but it should be transit, not at the expense of Polish farmers. Minister Kachka’s speech was a kind of calming and defusing of the atmosphere that had been building up for two or three days. I think that Ukraine has reconsidered its opinion, which was voiced earlier,” said the representative of the Polish government.

Telus also drew attention to the fact that the list of products banned from importation into specific countries should be flexible. As an example, he cited Bulgaria, which needs Ukrainian sunflower and can import it.

“This should be a decision at the EU level,” he added.

Taras Kachka, Deputy Minister of Economy and Trade Representative of Ukraine, confirmed the readiness of the neighboring countries to negotiate on television.

“On Monday, we presented our plan to control agricultural exports to all neighboring countries. We had a very good response from Romania and Bulgaria, which reacted quite positively and did not introduce national bans. The other three countries, including Poland, are also giving positive signals of their readiness to consider the mechanism proposed by Ukraine,” the Ministry of Economy’s press service quoted him as saying.

The minister noted that Ukraine has actually proposed to introduce a mechanism for joint verification and approval of supplies of four types of agricultural goods (wheat, corn, rapeseed and sunflower seeds) to five EU countries.

“This will not solve the problem completely, because it will actually indicate that trade between Ukraine and these five EU countries is conducted manually. But it will be a step forward and a rejection of the bans that are unacceptable to us in form. The Ukrainian proposal could become the basis for resolving the issue of agricultural exports to the five EU countries.

The Polish side has already stated that it is ready to work on solving this problem. I believe that we will be able to reach a compromise by the end of the week. In fact, it is important for both Poland and Ukraine to develop cooperation, trade, agriculture and take care of the interests of each other’s farmers, not just respond to public criticism,” assured Taras Kachka.

Tags: Poland, restrictions, Ukraine, grain