The European Union has provided Ukraine with three million euros to carry out the project “Technical Assistance to the Ukrainian Quality Infrastructure.”
The organizers of the project say that its main goal is to help strengthen and modernize quality control institutions (all aspects of metrology, standardization, testing, quality management, quality assessment, and accreditation). Reforms in this sphere are three-pronged, aiming at enhancing the competitiveness of Ukrainian companies, removing all the technical barriers in trading all over EU, and also reaching Ukraine’s targets in environmental safety, health care, and consumer protection.
“The project aims at enhancing Ukraine’s economic indices to enable it to produce goods and services that meet the EU requirements and international standards,” said Evangelos Vardakas, a member of the project implementation group, at the launch of the project. In his words, the orientation on EU consumers is very important. Though it is good to have 50 millions consumers within the country, it is much better to have as many consumers as there are in EU.
In the opinion of EU representatives, the present situation, when Ukrainian standards do not meet European requirements, persists because the state continues to interfere not only with the quality and safety of products, but also with their production and design. The state determines the parameters and the color of certain products. The experts also say that according to EU–Ukraine Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) signed in 1998 Ukraine had to bring the system of technical regulation and standards in line with the respective EU system. Furthermore, Ukraine became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), which imposes additional obligations, in particular harmonizing trading conditions with the requirements of this organization.
Experts say that Ukraine has been making progress in this direction but it has been too slow. Europeans think that in order to change the Ukrainian system of control, we need to change the national mentality a little bit. The most important thing is the total independence of all parts of the quality control system. The project also aims at introducing legislation and standards that meet European and international norms along with scrapping obsolete Ukrainian legislation and standards. If Ukrainian officials manage to make Ukrainian norms and standards comply with European requirements, the amount of direct investments will increase.
Ukrainian officials highly appreciate this assistance from the EU. Viktor Panteleienko, Deputy Economy Minister of Ukraine and the project coordinator, personally conveyed this thought at the launch of the project: “I would like to mention that there are positive as well as negative moments here. We haven’t learned yet how to use the tools which we have received with our WOT membership. We became a member of this international club, so we have to meet its requirements.”
Serhii Dorotych, first deputy head of Ukraine’s State Committee for Technical Regulation and Consumer Policy, has a similar conviction. He believes that it is significant that at a time when all countries experience the economic crisis, the EU finds time and money to enhance the safety of products and services in Ukraine.
Ukrainian consumers will benefit greatly from an improvement in the quality infrastructure, said Marco D’Ambrosio, Policy Officer, European Commission Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry. He believes that it will be a great gain for Ukrainian consumers to have a wider choice of cheaper and safer products.
Although Ukrainian officials have eagerly embraced cooperation with Europe, there are no noticeable improvements that would be a result of the project, which was officially launched on June 23, 2008. The project will be running for 30 months and will end on Dec. 22, 2010. Dimitris Bakolas, President of European Profiles S.A., has no doubt that the project will meet its goals, but, as he says, it will not bring Ukraine to the European level right away — it is only the beginning.
