Everything indicates that tomorrow the European Commission will decide to extend the duty-free trade regulation between the EU and Ukraine until June 6, 2025, which would only apply until June this year.
Ursula von der Leyen does not want to listen to a minister from Tusk’s government
Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski protests on this issue and presents hard data showing that these regulations destabilize agricultural markets, the so-called frontline countries, especially Poland. However, Czesław Siekierski, PSL’s new Minister of Agriculture, also addressed the European Commission in a similar vein.
So what if President Ursula von der Leyen and the Vice President of the European Commission and Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis (both from the European People’s Party) push through this decision with a battering ram (Commissioner Wojciechowski is expected to table a motion on this) issue during the dissenting vote of the EC meeting). Von der Leyen has promised this extension to Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and wants to announce the EC’s decision at this year’s summit in Davos, which starts on January 15. Although the above-mentioned extensions of the EC Regulation will still be voted on by the European Parliament, and later by the Council of Agriculture Ministers of the European Union, major changes to its content will be impossible.
Regulation on duty-free trade between the EU and Ukraine
The EC pushed through this regulation immediately after the Russian aggression against Ukraine and later extended it until June 2024. It was intended to be one of the aid instruments for Ukraine, but almost two years after its entry into force it appears that this country is not really helps. but destabilizes the agricultural markets of the frontline countries. Hence the unilateral embargo imposed by the government of Mateusz Morawiecki on the import of Ukrainian wheat, rapeseed and sunflower seeds into Poland, which is still in force, although the EC is pushing for its lifting and threatening to refer the case to the ECJ -EU and therefore with high financial sanctions. But it is not just grain imports from Ukraine that are destabilizing agricultural markets in Poland; this process also affects other products. For example, the import of sugar has increased more than twenty times in recent months, and the import of poultry and eggs has increased at least several times. That is why the protests of Polish farmers at the border with Ukraine have been suspended for a few days, because the new Minister of Agriculture promised them to introduce quantitative restrictions on imports from Ukraine, but apparently has done nothing about it.
Donald Tusk can’t do anything
It turns out that Donald Tusk, who portrays himself in Poland as a politician who can “do a lot” in Brussels when it comes to fighting for important Polish interests, can do nothing and has left the PSL Minister of Agriculture without support. And yet until recently he was president of the EPP and his party colleagues included the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the commissioner responsible for trade, Valdis Dombrovskis, and several other commissioners who were members of this party. Now, in a situation where duty-free trade with Ukraine, especially in agricultural products, is causing serious problems on the Polish market, and this has been proven by hard data from Eurostat, he has been unable to do anything, including introducing quantitative restrictions on imports into Poland, as requested by Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski.
During the debate on the renewal of the above-mentioned regulation, Commissioner Wojciechowski drew attention to another important issue, namely that allowing Ukraine to import agricultural products into the EU effectively led to Russia permanently removing Ukrainian exports from the markets of Africa and pushed out the Middle East. to land. Until the outbreak of war, Ukraine sold its agricultural products at attractive prices in these countries, exported them through the Black Sea, and after being blocked by Russia and introducing duty-free trade with the EU, most of its exports were shipped to the markets of EU countries, mainly in Poland, due to the lowest costs for transporting these products to our country. Moreover, the very idea of tax-free trade in agricultural products from Ukraine does not really help Ukraine, because the largest agricultural concerns operating in Ukraine are owned by foreign capital, and moreover, of the ten largest, as many as 9 of them are registered in tax havens , which means they don’t pay taxes in this country.
In any case, the extension of duty-free trade between the EU and Ukraine, without taking into account the Polish demands of the Polish Commissioner and the PSL Minister of Agriculture, is a gigantic failure of our country and a personal failure of our country. Donald Tusk. Both during the election campaign and after he became Prime Minister, he repeatedly spoke of his strong position in Brussels, famously saying: ‘No one in Brussels will beat me.’ On his first serious attempt he was played away like a child.
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Source: wPolityce