Brussels is preparing emergency curbs on Ukrainian grain imports to five member states close to the war-torn country, bowing to pressure from Poland and Hungary after they took unilateral action to pacify local farmers.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc would take “preventive measures” as EU officials tried to respond to several countries, including some of Kyiv’s staunchest allies, breaking ranks to defend their farmers from an influx of cheap grain.
The steps under discussion would bar imports of those products until June into the four member states bordering Ukraine, plus Bulgaria, except for re-export to other EU member states or parts of the world, said a senior EU official.
Von der Leyen said in a letter to the leaders of Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Bulgaria that the steps would “immediately counteract” the deteriorating situation for their producers of wheat, maize, oilseeds and sunflower seeds.
The highly unusual move is an attempt to regularise a spate of unilateral moves by a group of eastern European member states, which challenged the EU’s core powers over trade policy.
The commission said it will only take action if governments drop their current measures, which they have yet to agree to do. It will do so by availing of a rarely used power, contained in the measure that liberalised trade with Ukraine, and limit the new safeguards to only a few member states rather than the whole bloc.
Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia are among those that announced bans on food products from Ukraine over recent days, despite warnings from Brussels that their actions were potentially illegal.
The countries will receive €100mn from EU funds to compensate farmers, who have been in uproar.
After a meeting with the five countries on Wednesday night, the trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis and agriculture commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski said they were viewing a “swift solution”.
In a joint statement they said: “We underlined the importance of rapidly following a common EU approach, rather than unilateral solutions to avoid multiple bans and solutions which put the internal market at risk.”
The EU dropped tariffs and quotas on foodstuffs from Ukraine, an agricultural powerhouse, after the full-scale invasion by Russia last year. Resulting from fears that the world could go hungry, the regime was intended to last until the coming June.
However, much of the Ukrainian grain entering the bloc remained in its neighbouring countries and reduced prices locally. The EU wants to extend the wartime trade regime with Ukraine when it expires, but the revised version will have stronger provisions that allow the EU to take measures to “safeguard” its own market more rapidly in future, von der Leyen’s letter said.
Brussels will organise convoys of trucks, trains and barges to transport the grain to ports where it can be sent to countries in need, another official said. It would also increase the capacity of the river Danube.
Many commercial traders have refused to pay for this transport because it costs more than traditional seaborne trade through the Black Sea.
It remains unclear how this would be funded and organised. Spain had tried to subsidise a train to transport grain across the continent but it was much cheaper to import from Latin America, the official said.
Norbert Lins, chair of the European parliament’s agriculture committee, told the FT that Brussels should buy the grain itself and ship it to third countries. “The commission has the tools and should use them,” he said.
In her letter, von der Leyen said Brussels would investigate the situation for other “sensitive products,” following a request from Poland, which has also banned meat imports.
The five countries originally wrote to her at the end of March. Konrad Szymański, Poland’s former European affairs minister, said Brussels had been slow to act.
“Von der Leyen got what was an urgent letter [from the governments affected] and if she had responded to it in two or three days rather than now, we probably would not have such a problem,” said Szymański, who now works for the Polish Economic Institute, a Warsaw think-tank.
Additional reporting by Raphael Minder in Warsaw and Marton Dunai in Budapest
