The European Commission has published a draft regulation on extending trade preferences for Ukraine for a year. The organization plans not to return the quotas in force before the full-scale war with the Russian Federation, but to introduce a mechanism for protecting against significant amount of Ukrainian imports. As a result, Ukrainian producers will lose part of the market and will be forced to look for new opportunities.
This was reported by Delo. "For the most sensitive products - poultry, eggs and sugar - an emergency brake is provided, which would stabilise imports at the level of average imports in 2022 and 2023. This means that if imports of these products exceed these quantities, duties will be re-imposed so that imports do not significantly exceed the figures of previous years," the resolution explains.
Sergiy Karpenko, director of the Union of Ukraine Poultry Breeders (UUP), explains that if the draft resolution is adopted, the "emergency braking" mechanism will look like this: if in the period from 6 June 2024 to 31 December 2024 the cumulative imports of eggs, poultry meat or sugar from the beginning of 2024 reach the corresponding arithmetic mean of imports in 2022 and 2023, the European Commission must, within 21 days:
introduce, until December 31, 2024, a “pre-war” tariff quota for the relevant product, which was in effect until trade liberalization; introduce, from January 1, 2025, a tariff quota equal to five-twelfths of this arithmetic average, or the corresponding tariff quota that was in force before trade liberalization based on a larger indicator.Thus, in 2024, Ukraine has a chance to "roll back" its supplies of these products to the EU to the level of the "pre-war" quotas if the second half of the year exceeds the average for 2022 and 2023.
Sugar production and exports are accounted for by marketing years (MY), from September to August, reminds Nazar Mykhailovin, interim head of the Ukrsugar Association. In 2023/2023 MY, Ukraine’s sugar exports to the EU totalled 415 thsd tonnes, while the quota for 2021 is 20.7 thsd tonnes.
Sugar producers are already aware that the European Commission will allow Ukraine to import up to 320 thsd tonnes of sugar in 2024, the expert said. In general, sugar producers and the Ministry of Agrarian Policy agreed not to ship more than 650 thsd tonnes of sugar to the EU in 2023/2024 MY, and this volume is planned to be fully shipped by the end of June, two months before the end of the MY.