Even if farmers completely paralyzed traffic on the Polish-Ukrainian border, grain prices would not skyrocket. So what drives low prices? The poor condition of the world’s grain importers and surpluses at key grain exporters, most notably… Russia.
First there was the road crossing in Dorohusk. Protesting farmers broke into three trucks and spilled the grain they were carrying onto the roadway. Later, the grain was blown onto the tracks from a freight train in Medyka. On the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, beans cooed on the tracks in Dorohusk. The following night saw perhaps the most spectacular action – 160 tons of corn were dumped from a freight train bound for the port of Gdansk. The proud perpetrators documented this act from a drone, and their video went viral.
The Polish-Ukrainian border has been in chaos for a month. Volunteers with a humanitarian, suppliers of supplies to the military, and a swarm of passenger cars stand in queues for hours. Even a passenger train from Kiev was stopped. An exasperated crowd protected by police decides who can cross the border. If you add to this the gigabytes of (organic and not) anti-Ukrainian comments on the Internet, the now-famous pro-Putin banner on the tractor, and the uncompromising statements of politicians, you get the impression that all of Poland has sworn against Ukraine.
This feeling is confirmed by the latest scandal – on Tuesday, near the Polish-Belarusian border , Polish police detained two journalists from Ukrainska Pravda, a reputable Ukrainian daily. The men were preparing material on the import of agricultural products from Russia to Poland. According to the detainees’ accounts, the footage they shot was partially erased, and the interrogations lasted several hours and ended only after the Ukrainian ambassador intervened.
The hungry man does not understand
All these images provoke a powerful revulsion in Ukraine. Commentators call Poland’s attitude a slap in the face, a humiliation, a knife in the back. On the Ukrainian Internet, some people are trying to make fun of all this, but the prevailing attitude is one of piss. Somewhere I flash an angst-ridden post by a refugee woman stuck in line, causing her to miss her son’s funeral, and she has already lost two in the war.
Perhaps most painful are the images of spilled grain. They strike at a central Ukrainian trauma, namely the memory of the Holodomor, the great famine orchestrated in the 1930s. The USSR’s leadership was the first to be given a special treatment in the 1990s. Russia’s imperial lust took millions of Ukrainian lives then, and two years ago (in Donbass ten) it came back for more, and all indications are that it will not let go. Kremlin trolls, moreover, make sure that images of spilled grain are accompanied by an appropriate volume of anti-Polish content.
In addition, the images have terrible timing. The front is stuck, the chances of regaining control of the entire territory are diminishing, morale is withering, and there is a shortage of those willing to fight. Ukraine has entered a difficult stage of the war: all is not lost, the forces are still many and the fate can still turn around, but much depends on the support of the allies.
Meanwhile, the protests by Polish farmers – as Kateryna Pryshchepa argues in the latest episode of the Eastern Bloc podcast – are directly affecting the viability of Ukraine’s defense, and not just indirectly, that is, by weakening its economy. With delays of several weeks, the country’s arrivals include. tourniquets – an essential life-saving tool for soldiers and civilians during the war – and cars and car parts purchased from collections for the military.
Farmers have their own reasons for protesting. Ukrainian media pay little attention to them, the only acceptable context for any debate is war. With blood pouring all around, rockets wheezing and drones braying, it’s hard to survive the impoverishment of farmers in the world’s richest countries. It’s even harder to give up, in the name of their welfare, the (for now legal) opportunity to export grain to the EU. It is beyond the comprehension of our neighbors that allies are blocking Ukraine’s most important land border and advocating changes that will seriously damage the Ukrainian economy. Do they really not understand that if Ukraine falls, they will be next?
Farmers lose their life’s work
Farmers have, naturally, a very different perspective. Grain warehouses are full, and grain prices have fallen to levels of a decade ago, while production costs – energy, fertilizer, wages – have risen significantly. Meanwhile, the Green Deal imposes further restrictions on European farmers that will make it harder for many of them to turn a profit.
At the same time, Brussels is facilitating the import of food goods from outside the EU as part of various deals – in Poland you can see products from Ukraine, but already in Spain, for example, farmers are furious about tomatoes from Morocco, which the country exports to the EU in exchange for allowing Spanish fishermen to fish. The problem is that Ukrainian and Moroccan farmers do not have to meet a number of EU requirements, can use plant protection products banned in Europe, and pay lower wages. Their products are much cheaper, but this is not fair competition for EU producers.
Faced with an oversupplied agricultural market, many Polish farmers are on the verge of bankruptcy. They have no one to sell their grain, sugar, flour, fruit, eggs to, at least not at a price that will bring them a profit. The larger ones are reducing production, laying off people. They can probably handle it, not what the smallest ones can.
Europe-wide protests have already succeeded in persuading Brussels to withdraw its pesticide restrictions and fallow land order. But for exasperated farmers, it’s still not enough.
The Polish protests are united by two demands: withdrawal from the Green Deal and an embargo on products from across the eastern border. Anti-EU slogans dominate, but anti-Ukrainian slogans also occur. People are losing their life’s achievements, sometimes even the lives of their parents and grandparents, and on the Internet they read about poisonous technical grain, re-export of Ukrainian grain from EU countries to Poland or SUVs of oligarchs registered as humanitarian aid. They are redirecting their anger at the Ukrainians, which is being painstakingly worked on by Russian trolls, with the Confederation in step with them.
Low crop prices are not Ukraine’s fault
Yes, less than three and a half million tons of Ukrainian grain entered Poland (officially) in 2022 and early 2023, which to some extent contributed to the clogging of Polish grain warehouses. However, it is worth remembering that after the outbreak of the full-scale war, then Agriculture Minister Henryk Kowalczyk encouraged farmers to hold off on selling their grain, as its prices would rise. Meanwhile, “masses of much cheaper goods were piling up in ports, on rail sidings, near the Ukrainian border,” notes Krystyna Naszkowska in Gazeta Wyborcza. This is because the port of Gdansk was not able to ship out to the world all the Ukrainian grain that came down to Poland. The invisible hand of the market took an interest in it.
A separate issue is the so-called. technical grain, that is, grain that has industrial uses but is unfit for human consumption, purchased by a number of Polish companies, including flour producers. However, it was not Ukrainian farmers (equipped with anti-Polish pitchforks and dreams of a sanitary Volhynia, if Confederate-Russian disinformation is to be believed) who misled them. Technical grain importers were well aware of what they were importing and selling to Polish companies as domestic food grain. By the way: remember the technical salt affair a few years ago? At the time, the Czechs were fretting that the Poles wanted to poison them. Everyone has their own East.
Responding to growing discontent among farmers, in April 2023 Poland introduced an embargo on imports of four Ukrainian grains: wheat, corn, rapeseed and sunflower seeds. Since then, the products have been passing through Poland in transit on their way to seaports and other EU countries, although there are still cases of illegal unloading in Poland. Ukrainian grain is also sometimes re-exported to Poland from Slovakia (and on a much smaller scale, Business Insider found, from Lithuania and Germany). And Ukrainian farmers are not responsible for these machinations.
According to experts – such as Miroslaw Marciniak, an analyst of grain and oil markets, and Wiktor Szmulewicz, president of the National Council of Agricultural Chambers – the influx of Ukrainian grain into the EU has little impact on low grain prices on the world market. And it is this market that shapes prices in the EU, including Poland. Even if farmers completely paralyzed traffic on the Polish-Ukrainian border, grain prices would not skyrocket.
So what drives low prices? The poor condition of the world’s grain importers and surpluses at key exporters, most notably… Russia, which produces more and more wheat each year (forecasts for the ongoing season are 52 million tons for export). Some portion of it, rather small, enters the European market via neighboring countries, such as the United States. Moldova or Lithuania – because I don’t know if you know, but EU sanctions against Russia do not cover agri-food products. The rest are flooding world markets, choking grain prices.
Other Ukrainian products – such as sugar, fruits and eggs – continue to enter the Polish market without restriction and make life difficult for Polish farmers. For example, sugar imports into the EU have increased almost 35 times since the war began (check out this madness on OLX). However, it is not true that these products are of much lower quality or that they do not pass proper sanitary inspections.
A quarter-truth oozing through Confederate-Russian channels is also the claim that only oligarchs are making money on Ukrainian grain. This myth is disarmed in detail by Paulina and Wojciech Siegien in the latest episode of the Eastern Bloc podcast. Paulina cites data showing that agroholdings account for one-fifth of Ukraine’s grain production. From myself, I would add that, as much as I would not wish the Ukrainian oligarchs ill, in the current situation one should not forget that these companies are an important source of revenue for the barely breathing Ukrainian budget, as well as a place of work for many residents of the local countryside.
Government does not disassociate itself from anti-Ukrainian narratives
As you can see, Kremlin trolls – and the European far right behind them – are doing a great job of instrumentalizing the agricultural protests. In the Netherlands, they threaten farmers that their farms will be converted into refugee camps, In Germany, they assure that the Bundeswehr will arrive with tanks to help farmers get their hands on government buildings. In Poland, they are trying to stir up and reinforce existing resentment against Ukrainians and blame them for the poor position of Polish farmers. The Confederation is echoing these anti-Ukrainian narratives to bounce back after the October defeat. Law and Justice politicians do not shy away from them, and the government does not shy away either, although at the same time it is doing a great deal to support Ukraine – both domestically and internationally.
It is good that he is trying to fight in Brussels for better protection of the interests of Polish farmers and is responding to the protests, something that was not obvious to the authorities under either the PiS or the previous PO governments. However, it would be worthwhile to clarify what is actually in the interest of farmers, and what is an increasingly widespread belief born of misinformation. Particularly if it has just been heralded in Europe’s living rooms for fighting it out hard.
The coldness generated by the government toward Ukraine – for example, Donald Tusk’s refusal to meet with Ukrainian officials at the border – seems to me to be exaggerated. The image damage suffered in Ukraine is enormous. The picture showing Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal with a group of ministers standing sullenly at the blocked border hurt Ukrainians greatly and reinforced their disillusionment with the partnership with Poland, as did Tusk’s announcement that yes, he would meet with Ukrainians, but in a month and in Warsaw, and that he saw no need for “symbolic gestures.” In the situation in which Ukraine finds itself, they are badly needed.
The Polish government’s hard line is short-sighted. He may have calmed farmers down a bit, but at the same time he put Ukraine in a no-win situation. Shmyhal said that if the border is not unblocked in the coming month, the Ukrainian government will not rule out retaliation – which means an embargo on products from Poland. Meanwhile, Poland is the largest exporter of food to Ukraine – the value of our exports to the eastern border amounts to almost a billion zlotys and is increasing every year, also surpassing the value of imports (even the wartime ones). So Ukraine’s retaliation would hit Polish companies no less than EU regulations.
It is therefore very good that Donald Tusk announced last week the inclusion of border crossings with Ukraine in the list of critical infrastructure. Hopefully, this will help end the border blockade. The question, however, is how effective the Polish state will prove to be in enforcing its own regulations, and, let’s agree, this is not its strong point. Let me just remind you that last year the government with great pomp enacted a ban on photographing critical infrastructure, destruction of other people’s property is also punishable under Polish law. Meanwhile, incidents involving the dumping of Ukrainian products on key current transportation routes are not only proliferating, but are sometimes recorded with drones.
A lesson for Poland and Europe
In the conflict over Ukrainian agricultural products, three rule-governed interests clash: ecological (of the entire globe), economic (of Ukraine and – different – of some EU countries) and geopolitical (of the entire continent, but especially of Ukraine). It is very difficult to reconcile the two, but it is in the interest of all parties to work out some sort of compromise – this has already succeeded between Ukraine and Romania, for example. Even if Ukraine’s hard course doesn’t make it easier, we shouldn’t breed resentment – it’s claiming in the same sense as a person drowning, struggling hard and persevering to survive. It worries passersby with its location, but does not drag them down at all, as President Duda fingered last year. The opposite is true – we will drown if we do not give it a helping hand.
Regardless of whether we are guided in our approach to foreign policy by categories of feelings and values or hard realpolitik, we cannot leave Ukraine at the mercy of a creeping Russia in the West, which is already threatening Europe not only with nuclear war, but also with the restoration of the Cold War order. Last week, a campaign was launched in Russia to reject the findings of Germany’s reunification confederation. The return of eastern Germany to the Russian sphere of influence is a fantasy scenario from today’s perspective, but we cannot rule out the possibility that Russia will pursue it further in the future. Poland is already being portrayed to her in the narrative as the aggressor who is heating up the conflict and standing in the way of peace.
In turn, the compromise between Brussels and farmers must take into account an inconvenient truth for EU elites – the costs of the green transition must not be borne primarily by the middle and lower classes. If the introduction of the Green Deal is accompanied by further liberalization of food trade with non-EU countries (such as the Mercosur countries of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay), only the strongest will benefit. It is necessary to reassure medium-sized people that the Green Deal will not be introduced at their expense, and at the same time do everything possible so that they do not have to find out firsthand how disastrous global warming will be for them.
Indeed, without the support of the majority of Europeans, there is no way the Green Deal can succeed. And a backlash against unfavorable solutions for the weaker ones can make us all fry faster. If not in nuclear war, then in the effects of the climate crisis.
