Lucky weather has been pushing this year’s harvest to 100 million tons of grains, Ukraine Business News writes.
Nikolay Gorbachov, the president of the Ukrainian Grain Association, has predicted a record harvest of grains, oilseeds and beans of 100 tons total. It even beats the harvest of 2019-2020, which was in itself a strong harvest.
“What I can tell you about Ukraine is the conditions are just perfect,” Gorbachov said on the International Grains Council’s Grain Conference, where he predicted a 22 percent rise in corn harvest, 20 percent rise in wheat, 28 percent rise in sunflower seeds and no change in the canola harvest.
According to Gorbachov, there will not be issues with capacity in exporting the harvest even though it is the biggest harvest in years. “Now we can load without any problem 70 to 80 milion tons of grain per year,” Gorbachov said.
Land reform next week
In just eight days, the long awaited lift on the moratorium on sales of farmland is coming and a relatively free land market is introduced. In the beginning, only Ukrainians will be able to buy Ukrainian land, as there is enormous resistance to the idea of letting foreigners buy farmland in Ukraine.
So far, with the law as it is now, the land market is still somewhat restricted. Only Ukrainians can buy up to 100 acres of land, and corporations are not allowed to buy land yet, though it is expected in the near feature.
It is, therefore, unlikely that the land reform will solve many of the problems for Scandinavian companies working in agriculture in Ukraine – the primary being uncertainty of ownership and the bureaucracy associated with renting land from thousands of individuals to maintain the necessary volume to operate a profitable business in Ukraine.
Since the supply chain usually connected with agriculture is lacking in Ukraine, companies are forced to, for example, operate their own repair shops which in turn means, that they also need a sizeable machine park for the repair shops to service. For the equipment not to be redundant, naturally they need work which in this case means that they need a lot of land to work.
