WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland and Ukraine are close to an agreement on agricultural imports, a Polish lawmaker told state news agency PAP on Wednesday, ahead of talks between the countries’ governments as Warsaw seeks to defuse protests by farmers.
Farmers in Poland and elsewhere in the European Union have been protesting to demand the re-imposition of customs duties on agricultural imports from Ukraine that were waived after Russia’s invasion in 2022.
They say Ukraine’s farmers are flooding Europe with cheap imports that leave them unable to compete.
Polish Agriculture Minister Czeslaw Siekierski will meet his Ukrainian counterpart Mykola Solsky on Wednesday in Warsaw, with the governments of the countries due to meet on Thursday.
“We are close to solving these problems together in dialogue,” said Krzysztof Paszyk, the leader of the parliamentary party of the agrarian Polish Peasants’ Party (PSL), part of the ruling coalition. “One of the topics is to be the grain issue, this problem can be solved.”
“I think that it will be possible today and tomorrow to make what is sometimes called a transit actually a transit … I am optimistic about the results.”
Polish farmers say that much of the Ukrainian grain which is supposed to transit through Poland ends up on the domestic market.
Kyiv says the protests, which have included blockades of the border and the spilling of Ukrainian grain across rail tracks, are harming its war effort and economy. It also says that only a small portion of the grain it exports transits through Poland.
The European Union reached a provisional agreement this month to grant Ukrainian food producers tariff-free access to its markets until June 2025, albeit with new limits on imports of grains.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Sharon Singleton)
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