The Cabinet of Ministers is setting up on the basis of the Food Industry Committee now being disbanded the State Food Department to be vested with governmental administrative powers. The renaming is highly symptomatic and seems to reflect the current food situation in Europe’s former breadbasket.
A source in the Ministry of Agrarian Policies told The Day that this country has seen a drastic fall in the per capita consumption of meat, milk, vegetables, and fruit. Both the elderly and children go hungry in cities and villages. According to The Day’s experts, mass poverty is becoming the main component of a food security problem, which is also shown by the fact that none other than this topic may be on the agenda of the next meeting of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine.
Many large cities have seen abrupt price hikes for bread. According to The Day’s source, in this connection the government, which has a little over a million tons of grain as state reserve (24 million tons were harvested last year, the lowest since 1945), has decided to throw onto the market 200,000 tons to bring down prices.
Forecasts for this year’s harvest are also pessimistic, although Agricultural Ministry figures have already voiced their intention to harvest 28 million tons. President of the Ukrainian League of Agro-Industrial Entrepreneurs, People’s Deputy Leonid Kozachenko, cast doubt on this figure in an interview with The Day. He believes this year’s harvest will be even lower than the last one’s because the lnd, in spite of all “measures,” remains uncultivated and bare. According to Mr. Kozachenko, there are a host of insoluble problems in the countryside, such as shortage of resources, lack of funds in rural enterprises, and the difficulty of reforming the latter. Mr. Kozachenko said the agricultural bureaucrats are excessively optimistic. In his opinion, rural reform should have been launched as long as three years ago, when agrarian resources were not so meager.
However, it is better to start today than the day after tomorrow. And we hope the first step has already been taken: the “patient,” i.e., the state, has been diagnosed as having the problem of food supplies. But merely stating the facts is not enough to solve the problem.
