Ukraine is often regarded as a country that lives proceeding from its upper-echelon political interests, and that it pays little if any attention to worldwide discussions. While this country is debating the long-overdue land reform, the rest of the world is discussing the possibility of quickly and effectively digitalizing the agrarian sector. Bill Gates has joined the debate, making a field day for The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Nation, and other major periodicals.
The Governing Council of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) recently convened in Rome. Ukraine isn’t a member of this specialized agency of the United Nations and there was no one competent enough to send to Rome to confirm Ukraine’s interest in the dialog on measures aimed at upgrading agribusiness and preventing famine.
Taking part in such events is far more important than any paid-for world media coverage of Ukraine. The official session of the IFAD Governing Council dealt with pertinent problems, looking at them from different angles, discussing ways of turning the agrarian sector into effective business, without damaging the environment; how to collaborate so one’s useful experience can be shared by all, while preventing the donor money from ending up on a ranking bureaucrat’s offshore bank account, so this money can reach the designated beneficiary. Among those present were the president of Rwanda, the prime minister of Italy, the vice president of Liberia, and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. The latter addressed those present saying: “Investments in agriculture are the best weapons against hunger and poverty, and they have made life better for billions of people. The international agriculture community needs to be more innovative, co-ordinated, and focused to help poor farmers grow more. If we can do that, we can dramatically reduce suffering and build self-sufficiency.”
Food crisis is one of the biggest problems these days. The IFAD meeting in Rome provided statistics to the effect that by the year 2050 the population of the planet Earth will reach nine billion.
Rosemary Vargas-Lundius, Senior Research Coordinator, IFAD’s Office of Strategy and Knowledge Management, said the smallholder farmers would have to increase their output by 70 percent to feed so many people, and that this would require an average 12 percent increase in the areas under crops, in developing countries; that this process could be helped by new technologies and a combination of traditional scientific achievements and new discoveries.
IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze said that poverty and hunger are behind many problems facing this world: “This growing level of climate risk and uncertainty is one of the major challenges facing agriculture and food systems today, particularly where it is combined with land degradation, water scarcity, and fierce competition for natural resources.”
Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti noted that the energy and food crises are challenges to be considered even more seriously than the financial crisis. He believes they can cause political instability across the world: “We need to find innovative and bold solutions to the conflicting needs of demographic change, job creation, and environmental sustainability.”
A number of participating experts told The Day, off the record, that they were interested in collaborating with Ukraine in terms of environment-friendly agribusiness, stressing Ukraine’s remarkable potential – ending up admitting that Ukraine isn’t prepared for this kind of collaboration. Sad but true.
Does this mean that Ukraine, as Europe’s granary, is being kept aside from important international discussions? Can this country offer the international community anything while being unable to solve its own problems, what with another redistribution of resources being underway? The following are commentaries by The Day’s experts.
Vitalii LVOV, vice president, Association of Farming Servicing Cooperatives of Ukraine; CEO, Muravsky Shliakh farm:
“Ukraine is largely an agrarian country; it can’t be outside the IFAD, it being a prestigious specialized UN agency. Bill Gates is right, of course. There are 42,000 farming businesses, thousands of farming cooperatives, and over four million private farmers. The latter produce 80 percent of milk and 65 percent of meat. None of them should be left without digital data support.
“President Yanukovych is known to have addressed the UN and proposed to increase Ukraine’s share in the international food safety program. In December 2011, the Verkhovna Rada passed the food safety bill in the second reading, but this law sounds declarative rather than effective, so I can understand why the president hasn’t signed it. Perhaps adding a clause on information technologies adjusted to the farming needs and incentives would help.
“Our estimates show that about 40 percent of the 42,000 farming businesses have email addresses and regularly use the Internet, with its buy-and-sell sites that offer a broad range of market supply and demand opportunities, so one can save money purchasing pesticides, mineral fertilizer, seeds, and equipment. The Internet offers all kinds of data, including world market farming costs and prices, so our farmers can use this data to sell their goods at a profit, considering that domestic funding and investments have always been a problem in Ukraine. These problems can be solved using the Internet. Regrettably, there is no national, even sectoral digital data support program in the agrarian sector, meant for the medium and stallholder farmers, people who work 60-70 percent of Ukraine’s farmlands.”
Maria KOLESNYK, head of the analysis department, AAA Consulting Agency:
“Even without IFAD membership Ukraine has become actively involved in this international food safety project. Ukraine is a major supplier of grain and vegetable oil. Further progress will be determined by the assortment of goods to be exported. True, this year’s weather conditions will impede this progress, considering that some of Ukraine’s winter crops have frozen, and that seeds will have to be sown again in spring. In other words, Ukraine’s grain exports may falter this year.
“Ukraine supplies grain abroad, funded by the United Nations. If the IFAD decides to pay, Ukraine will help replenish the world’s food resources.
“Ukraine is mainly exporting raw materials rather than finished commodities, particularly in terms of crops, spelling large sums in hard cash. Here the main thing is non-interference on the government’s part. In the cattle-breeding sector the situation is worse, because most export markets are closed for Ukraine – not because of poor quality but because each country protects its domestic producers. Investments must be made in the upgrading of equipment, as well as in the digitalizing of the agrarian sector.”
Interviewed by Vitalii KNIAZHANSKY, Natalia BILOUSOVA, The Day
