The agricultural sectors of the EU’s eastern flank would be crushed if Ukraine was admitted into the European Union, former Polish Prime Minister Leszek Miller has warned.
“Let’s imagine what would happen if Ukraine joins the European Union and there is no way to control and regulate the inflow of goods. This would mean that Polish agriculture, but also Romanian, Bulgarian and Slovak agriculture would receive very painful, even fatal blows. Because no one can compete with Ukrainian production,” Miller said in an interview with Polish media this week.
“In Poland, the average farm is about 11 hectares, but in Ukraine there are large latifundistas, large agricultural enterprises with 600,000, 700,000 and even 800,000 hectares,” Miller, who served as prime minister between 2001 and 2004, and as leader of Poland’s Democratic Left Alliance from 2011-2016, and is now an MEP, said.
“How can you compete with this on equal terms? You simply can’t!” the politician stressed, adding that most of these large farms belong to Ukrainian oligarchs who are also members of the government, plus large international mega conglomerates in the US, Switzerland and Britain.
“It must be stated clearly that it is impossible to continue to push for solutions which are very friendly to the Ukrainian economy and only to the Ukrainian economy. If Ukraine wants to join the EU, it must get used to the fact that it will not have any relief or any preferential solutions, as it currently does,” Miller recommended.
The former PM said he did not advocate for cutting off aid to Ukraine entirely, including as far as weapons are concerned. “But this does not mean that we have to give a death sentence to Polish agriculture and passively look on. This is madness! Either we are Poles and we will also be responsible for Polish farms, for Polish agriculture and for Polish industry, or we don’t care,” Miller summed up.
Miller’s remarks come amid the ongoing Polish-Ukrainian spat over food imports, which has seen Polish farmers protesting along the frontier with Ukraine over unchecked imports of Ukrainian grain. The protest, which kicked off on February 9, has included the blocking of roads and access to border checkpoints across eastern Poland.
On Friday, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk asked the Brussels to increase its financial support to Poland to help protect Warsaw’s agricultural sector.
“We have the right to expect from our European partners, from the European Union, increased assistance and protection of Polish agriculture. I will be very consistent in this matter,” Tusk said, adding that the Ukrainian crisis cannot justify the “terrible losses” facing Polish producers.
Poland, Slovakia and Hungary each unilaterally extended bans on the duty-free import of Ukrainian grain last September, prompting Kiev to file a complaint against the three countries with the World Trade Organization.
The spat over food imports is the most sensitive of several outstanding issues between Poland and Ukraine, which authorities in both countries have sought to sweep under the rug. Another sensitive subject relates to the Ukrainian government’s glorification of Nazi collaborator militias murdered up to 200,000 Poles, as well as anti-fascist Ukrainians, Russians and Jews, during World War II.
The Zelensky government sees Ukraine’s EU membership as one important way to plug gaps in its budget amid falling revenues, declining Western financial assistance, and rising public and state debt. Last fall, media revealed that Brussels had plans to dole out up to €186 billion ($200 billion US) to Ukraine, a prospect which would drain the bloc’s coffers and turn its present Eastern European members from net recipients of EU assistance into donors.