Polish farmers are threatening to derail a visit to Warsaw by Volodymyr Zelenskiy over claims that Ukrainian grain is flooding their market, in a move that would provide Russia with valuable evidence of a crack in western solidarity.
Ukraine’s president is scheduled to visit Poland’s capital on Wednesday to express his gratitude for the country’s solidarity over the war with Russia, but Polish grain producers are warning they could take to the streets to “ruin” the occasion.
“Warsaw should think the thing over,” said Marcin Sobczuk, the head of the Zamość Farmers’ Association, in an interview with the Polish news website Interia. He said the association was ready to “spoil” the visit, adding: “There are a lot of ideas, but it is too early to talk about it.”
As part of an EU initiative, all tariffs and quotas have been lifted on Ukrainian grain exports into the bloc’s 27 member states in order to facilitate the product’s transit around the world, including to Africa, where a Russian blockade on Ukrainian exports has been particularly painful.
The grain has, however, failed to move out of some eastern EU countries, including Poland, Hungary and Romania, forcing down prices in those countries and fuelling resentment in farming communities.
Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, had said he would ask the European Commission and member states to reimpose barriers to Ukrainian grain exports but Polish farmers claim nothing has been done.
“We thought that the minister took us seriously, but it turned out to be otherwise,” Sobczuk said.
Poland has been one of Ukraine’s biggest cheerleaders since Vladimir Putin sent his military into the country in February 2022, and has urged the EU to go further and faster in its economic sanctions regime.
Morawiecki was one of the first European leaders to visit Kyiv, and he has been a strong advocate for Ukraine’s early membership of the EU, within which its exporters would enjoy free and unencumbered trade.
Domestic politics has, however, started to intrude, with the government recently reducing its financial offer to Ukrainian refugees and now signalling its opposition to the war-torn country’s grain accumulating in Poland.
The grain is gathering due to a lack of transport capacity to move it on. The specific infrastructure issues lie in Ukrainian freight trains using on a different track gauge to those on EU railways, and the need to prioritise importing coal into Poland after a prohibition on Russian imports.
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There has also been a reduction in demand from Africa since the global economic downturn.
With the war continuing, local farmers have been increasingly vociferous in their complaints that they are being undercut by Ukrainian grain imports, which rose to 2.45m tons in 2022 from just under 100,000 tons in a normal year.
The EU member states recently approved €56.3m in support for Bulgarian, Polish and Romanian farmers, and Poland’s agriculture ministry announced compensation. However, the money has been described as a “drop in the ocean”. Earlier this month, Poland’s agriculture minister, Henryk Kowalczyk, was pelted with eggs during a panel discussion with the EU agriculture commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski.
While grain imports are stockpiling in eastern Europe, Ukrainian exports remain down by nearly 18% to 36.9m tons on the year, after the Russian invasion and the blockade of key ports such as Odesa and the uneven application of a deal with Moscow to allow free transit.
