The Romanian Ministry of Agriculture and representatives of large agricultural organizations reached an agreement with the farmers after considering their demands. The latter protested for almost a week.
This was reported by Euractiv.
Minister of Agriculture Florin Barbu noted that the agreement contains 13 demands of farmers. Discussions will continue to find a compromise on outstanding requests.
The Romanian government agreed to compensate farmers for losses caused by imports from Ukraine, in particular to label grain and other goods, as well as to conduct electronic monitoring of sealing with the help of GPS in the port of Constanța.
One of the farmersʼ representatives at the negotiations said that the signed agreement does not mean an immediate end to the protests, as negotiations with transporters are still pending.
The government has also committed to fully subsidize all agricultural excise taxes by 2026 and to introduce provisions on subsidized interest loans.
The Romanian media Digi24 and Stiripesurse wrote that the transporters demanded to change the conditions of the mandatory civil liability insurance of the car owner, to exempt agricultural machinery and trucks from periodic technical inspections, to cancel the mandatory installation of GPS, to improve the crediting system of the agricultural sector, and also to ban the import of Ukrainian grain into the country, but the government did not wanted to go for it.
- Romanian farmers and transporters went on strike, spontaneously blocking roads in the country, as well as border points with Moldova, Bulgaria and Ukraine. On January 15, they announced that they had blocked the checkpoints "Vicova-de-Sus — Krasnoilsk" and "Siret — Porubne".
- The day before, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary, in a joint letter to the European Commission, asked to introduce import duties on Ukrainian grain due to alleged unfair competition.