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EU governments agreed on Friday to extend for a year the suspension of tariffs and quotas on imports from Ukraine to help its economy during the war with Russia. Sweden, which holds the rotating EU presidency for six months, said EU ambassadors agreed to the extension at a meeting on Friday. The European Union suspended tariffs for an initial 12 months in June 2022.
The suspension of all tariffs led to complaints from agricultural groups, culminating in Poland and Hungary banning some grain imports from Ukraine earlier this month. Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine already benefited from the elimination of the vast majority of EU tariffs, in some cases with transition periods, under the EU-Ukraine free trade agreement applied since 2016.
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However, the EU maintained tariffs and quotas under that deal on Ukraine's most sensitive agricultural products, such as meat, dairy, sugar and some cereals.
The European Commission has now proposed paying compensation to farmers in five countries that border Ukraine, as well as allowing these countries to prevent domestic sales of certain Ukrainian grains while allowing their transit for export elsewhere.
The countries became transit routes for Ukrainian grain that could not be exported through their Black Sea ports. The European Parliament's trade committee overwhelmingly backed suspending import tariffs for another year on Thursday, ahead of the assembly's vote in May.
Source: Reuters with translation agrolink
