Ukraine: Parliament approves draft setting export duties instead of export quotas for grain

Ukraine’s cabinet approved a draft law setting export duties for grains, agricultural researcher APK-Inform said on March, 23, citing Mykola Markevych, head of the Association of Farmers and Private Landowners

Proposed duties are 9 percent for wheat, 14 percent for barley and 12 percent for corn, Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine-based APK-Inform said on its website. The bill won cabinet approval on March 21, after which legislators must consider and vote on the measure, it said. The association represents 43,000 farms and 3,000 individual agricultural producers.

Duties would replace the wheat, barley and corn export quotas imposed by the government in October in an effort to curb local prices after a summer drought cut the harvest. The current export limits of 4.2 million metric tons run through March.

The draft legislation has yet to appear on the parliamentary website, it is reported.

As of March 1, the eastern European nation had exported 7.9 million tons of grains since the current marketing year started July 1, Liza Malyshko, an analyst at Kiev-based researcher UkrAgroConsult, said last week. Agriculture Minister Mykola Prysyazhnyuk in January predicted outbound shipments of at least 13 million tons in the year.

The government may increase the quotas after the end of March by 2 million to 2.5 million tons for corn and 500,000 to 800,000 tons for wheat, the minister said Feb. 22.

25 March, 2011