European farmers' protests are justified, all farmers are currently squeezed by the high costs of the standards they meet and by competing imports from Ukraine, Agriculture Minister Kiril Vatev told journalists on Thursday in the Troyan monastery, Lovech Municipality, northwestern Bulgaria.
"Bulgaria is no exception, we are in exactly the same situation. You know that the five countries closest to Ukraine - Romania, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria - are in fact the most affected by Ukrainian imports. We have done our best to protect our market from dumped imports. Naturally, there are people who are interested in this happening, but we are obliged to protect our producers as well," the minister said.
According to him, there is a good dialogue with farmers. "There are reasonable people among them, there are also those who want to protest at any cost," Vatev said. He said that on Sunday, February 4, at 3 p.m., there is a meeting between him, farmers, the prime minister and the finance minister.
Vatev said that the meeting will be third of this sort. According to him, there is an understandable and objective problem that has arisen after the adoption of the state budget, when suddenly claims for support due to the series of crises and especially the losses due to the war in Ukraine were raised. Vatev said that the necessary extra funding has grown to some BGN 550 million and since it is not envisaged in the budget it is difficult to obtain without a revision of the budget.
The agriculture minister stressed that the sides are not in a battle but in negotiations. He said that the Finance Ministry is making estimations with data from the National Revenue Agency, but the issue is that there is no data for 2023, when the agricultural sector was in serious loss, but calculations are based on 2022, when the sector was in surplus.
According to him, grain growers in the last business year were at a loss because of the many expensive fertilizers, plant protection products and have planted the most expensive crop for the last 10 years. All this combined with a very dry summer of 2023 which brought down yields, has raised the cost of production a lot so that grain growers cannot caompete with Ukrainian import prices which are below market ones, Vatev added.
Regarding the derogation proposed by the European Commission for 2024 from the rules of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which oblige them to keep certain areas non-productive, the Minister pointed out that it is absolutely applicable and necessary because in all countries the conditions are not the same and the same rules cannot apply to all.
/MR/
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