It’s very likely that their protests will keep growing and could continue morphing into a new Solidarity movement that poses a serious challenge to the government.
An estimated 70,000 protesters blockaded around 570 locations in Poland this week in the largest demonstrations thus far in support of their farmers, whose livelihoods are on the brink of ruin due to the continued influx of cheap and low-quality Ukrainian grain into the domestic market. The EU’s provisional decision to cap some Ukrainian grain at the average 2022-2023 volume levels importantly excluded wheat and barley, and tariff exemptions on all imports will remain in place for another year.
Bloomberg then reported the day after that “Europe’s Support for Ukrainian Wheat Gets Farmers Even Angrier” since this preliminary measure doesn’t address their concerns. EU Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski also said last week that Polish agriculture is losing on trade with Ukraine. He’s Polish and a member of the former conservative-nationalist government that imposed restrictions on Ukrainian imports but has come under pressure from the new liberal-globalist government to resign.
Regarding the incumbent authorities, they’re now trying to distract the protesters by pushing through an EU proposal to tariff Russian agricultural imports in response to a Ukrainian influence operation falsely alleging that these low-level imports are responsible for the farmers’ plight. This analysis here covers the various dimensions of their anti-Polish information warfare campaign since the protests resumed in January for those who are interested in learning more about this meddling.
The importance in referencing this is to inform the reader of why Poland supports a proposal that even Politico admitted is “more of a distraction than a real solution to the difficult economic situation facing European farmers, given the relatively low share of the EU market accounted for by (Russian) imports.” Ukraine’s APK-Inform Analytic and Information Agency also boasted that “Tariffs for Russian grain to boost Ukrainian wheat competitiveness in EU market”. (more...)
The EU’s Approach Towards Ukrainian and Russian Agricultural Imports Harms Polish Farmers
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