The Council of the EU and the European Parliament previously agreed to extend the suspension of import duties and quotas on Ukrainian exports to the EU until June 5, 2025.
This is stated in the press release of the Council of the EU.
At the same time, the European Union will increase the protection of "sensitive agricultural products", strengthening the precautionary measures that are included in the current resolution on temporary trade liberalization measures. This is necessary to take into account negative effects on the market of one or more Member States, and not only on the EU market as a whole.
New automatic protection will be added to products such as poultry, eggs, sugar, oats, corn, cereals and honey. That is, the European Commission will introduce tariff quotas if the import of such products exceeds the arithmetic average of the volumes imported in 2022 and 2023.
The European Commission will act more quickly (within 14 days instead of 21) if it has to introduce automatic safeguards.
Along with this, the European Commission will continue to monitor the import of wheat and other grain crops, automatic protection will apply to four additional products (oats, corn, groats and honey).
Currently, the European Parliament and the Council of the EU have to approve the interim agreement.
- After the start of the full-scale war, the European Union canceled all tariffs and quotas for the transit of Ukrainian grain. This did not suit farmers from Poland, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia. These countries began to ban the import of Ukrainian grain, and the European Commission allocated funds to European farmers.
- Ukraine is ready to accept restrictions on its trade with the EU in exchange for resolving the dispute with Poland. Kyiv is calling on the bloc to ban imports of Russian agricultural products, which still come through Belarus and the Baltic states.