Europe’s never-ending struggle to provide tidbits of assistance to Ukraine while still pandering to the agricultural lobbies that dictate so much policy in Brussels took another tortured turn this week. The European Commission hammered out its latest, tentative compromise plan to offer Kyiv another year of tariff-free access to the European single market for some agricultural products—but it’s not a done deal, and it could end up as a nasty tripwire for Ukraine’s hopes to join the European Union.
At issue is a monthslong tussle over the renewal of tariff-free access for a handful of Ukrainian farm goods, such as eggs, poultry, honey, and maize (corn). Ukraine, which is not a member of the EU and is in the middle of a war with Russia, desperately wants the trade relief, which it figures is worth well over 1 billion euros a year in much-needed export earnings.
Europe as a whole is unlikely to be concerned about such rounding-error figures, but certain groups in Europe—namely farmers in eastern “front-line” countries—care very much indeed. Farmers in Poland have added angry chants against Ukrainian food imports to the standard-issue complaints about the European Green Deal and free trade that animate farmer protests across the continent; they’ve even blocked the borders east and west in protest against what they say is a flood of outside food that is undermining their livelihood.
In a nutshell, Europe’s bid to offer Ukraine the tiniest of economic lifelines is threatening to weaken support for the country’s eventual membership in the EU by angering groups with outsized political influence that feel threatened by what looks to them like the stealth arrival of a new trade rival. That is most evident in Poland, Ukraine’s neighbor, which when the war began was hugely supportive of aiding Kyiv in any way possible but which in recent months has become a lot more sour on defense assistance, Ukrainian refugees, Ukrainian wheat, and, of course, Ukrainian EU membership.
According to recent opinion polls, support among Poles for further aid to Ukraine is dropping sharply, and that is especially true among more right-wing voters (as is true across much of Europe). One big reason for this decline in support is the fight that Polish farmers have waged against what they see as a flood of cheap, foreign food.
“What I can say is that the support for Ukraine has taken a real hit in Poland. Look at enlargement, support for refugees, even weapons,” said Isabell Hoffmann, a survey expert at Eupinions, an independent platform for European public opinion. “Support was extraordinarily strong before, and it is still strong today. But it weakened notably and quickly.”
Poland has been fighting over Ukrainian food imports for a year, but the protests intensified at the beginning of this year with further border blockages and anti-Ukraine animus which have found widespread popular support.
“This issue has become very toxic in domestic politics. There are more and more critical voices in Poland,” said Piotr Buras, the head of the Warsaw office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). “This is the paradox: The European Commission is talking about more gradual integration with Ukraine and the single market, but we are talking about the gradual closing of the single market for Ukraine.”
All this began, like so many of Ukraine’s current woes, with the full-scale Russian invasion in early 2022, which threatened Ukraine’s breadbasket agricultural regions and, importantly, its main export route through the Black Sea. The EU offered emergency tariff relief for a host of Ukrainian agricultural goods so they could travel overland and into the EU and trade without prejudice.
For Ukraine, desperate to earn foreign currency and boost the few exports that were left after the Russian invasion, it was a tidy little lifeline.
“From an economic point of view, agriculture remains one of the key export sectors of Ukraine,” said Marek Dabrowski, an expert on European trade and enlargement issues at Bruegel, a think tank. “Before the war, it was metallurgy and industry, but then part of that was destroyed, and part is occupied, so exports now are essentially down to agricultural goods. The reason for these ‘emergency measures’ has not gone away.”
Indeed, those emergency measures have continued every year since—until now. The European Commission planned to simply roll the tariff relief over this year, giving Ukraine one more year of free access, worth about 1.7 billion euros for Kyiv’s empty coffers. But many of the countries bordering Ukraine, including Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, pushed back at what they viewed as a flood of cheap Ukrainian grain that was undermining their own farmers. Some countries, such as Poland, unilaterally blocked Ukrainian farm goods from staying in the country.
Together, and most recently backed by France, those countries pushed for a tougher version of tariff relief for Ukraine that would have limited the amount of agricultural goods it could sell to Europe. The European Commission and European Parliament have been at work hammering out ever-tougher versions of tariff relief ever since.
The latest proposal would still offer Ukraine relief for another year but with tougher quota baselines, which would cost Kyiv about 350 million euros annually. Ukraine’s farm lobby on Thursday decried the slide toward EU “protectionism” in the latest wrangling. But even that compromise measure still has to pass the European Parliament, where it could face yet further efforts to weaken Ukraine’s access.
While an extension, even a watered-down one, would still be welcome in Ukraine, the problem is the perception that such preferential trade policies create in front-line countries such as Poland. Ukrainian grain is not the cause for the plight of Polish farmers any more than it is the reason for angst in the countryside in the other 26 EU member states; that has a lot more to do with falling prices for global agricultural staples such as wheat, as well as slightly tougher (and costlier) EU regulations on agricultural production.
But many who are getting kicked while they are down don’t look carefully at precisely who is doing the kicking, and continual European assistance for Ukraine rubs many in the east the wrong way.
The temporary trade measures amounted to a full opening, Buras of ECFR said. “Basically, Ukraine jumped from a piecemeal opening to European access to the final stage of this process,” he said. “Nobody expected these measures to remain in place for three years or more. Technically, we have a full opening of the single market to Ukrainian products.”
The risk is that the tiny measures Europe is taking to shore up Ukraine today with trade relief could end up as a poisoned chalice in years to come. Once the war is over, Ukraine is widely expected to get on with its decade-long quest to become a member of the EU—a step that ultimately needs the go-ahead from all current member states.
“The Ukrainians should also, seen from Warsaw, be a little more careful when they push for more liberalization,” Buras said. “At the end of the day, Ukrainians are dependent on Polish support” to join the EU, he added.
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