Economy Ministry goes through the motions of discussing WTO membership with the Agrarians
The Ministry of the Economy tried to come to terms with the Agrarian lobby on the conditions of Ukraine’s WTO membership yesterday. The attempt proved futile, as Ivan Tomych, chairman of the VR agrarian committee, ignored the meeting and did not even bother to explain his absence, while Agrarian leader Kateryna Vashchuk was not invited. However, even those present — chairmen of various sector associations — gave the cabinet quite enough food for thought. The main inference was that Ukraine’s agrarian elite has a rather vague idea about the WTO and what its membership has in store for Ukrainian farmers. Economy Minister Valery Khoroshkovsky had to ask several times during the meeting not to deviate from the subject of Ukraine’s prospects as a WTO member. Apparently, the topic was too complicated for the people representing sector lobbies.
Liudmyla Zinchenko, chairperson of the Ukroliya Association, appear to have incomplete information concerning the sunflower seed prices agreed to by the WTO and the cabinet. She said that members of the association often want to know about possible threats after the lifting of the customs barriers. Inquiries forwarded to the Ministry of the Economy more often than not remain unanswered. She also said that sector associations are often isolated from the political decision-making process. Actually, their only option is to protest after a decision has been made. Yesterday’s meeting showed that this rather strange strategy is true of both the ministry and agrarian leaders in the parliament. These leaders, it transpired, seldom bother to contact associations of agricultural producers.
That these associations have such poor information about the WTO and related problems is frightening, especially considering that rank-and-file farmers know even less. Yevhen Kovtaniuk, chairman of the Ukrzernoprodukt Association, told the meeting that most of the farmers he had dealt with do not even know what the acronym WTO means. This is probably the most negative assessment of the cabinet’s performance in the course of talks with WTO over the past several years.
Without doubt, if the Ministry of the Economy really wanted farmers to know about the possible consequences of Ukraine’s WTO membership, the talks would be held behind closed doors, because the point at issue is coordinating tariffs per commodity group, and this is classified information. No one in the agrarian sector has held such talks. Meetings in the presence of media people are repeated declarations by the minister of the economy and his subordinates. These meetings lack the main thing, dialog.
What makes the situation ironic is that the ministry’s efforts are “coded” in such a way as to have the opposite effect. The parliament passed the bill on preferential imports of 350,000 tons of raw sugar, faced with the threat of short domestic market supply. Meanwhile, the Ministry of the Economy is negotiating steady 250,000 ton yearly import quotas after joining WTO. Australia and Poland were quick on the uptake and drew the Ukrainian government’s attention to the discrepancy, asking the quota be raised to 407,000 tons, effective as soon as Ukraine becomes a WTO member. Such embarrassing incidents would not take place if the cabinet coordinated its stand during the negotiations at least in parliament.
Valery Pyatnytsky, state secretary of the Economy Ministry, was openly surprised by how little agrarian representatives knew about the terms and conditions of Ukraine’s WTO membership. He said that all such information is easily available on the Internet. Also, he advised the agrarians to read cabinet bills relating to WTO membership: everything is there. This was a bad tactical mistake on the part of the ministry’s leadership. Apparently they confuse information about their work meant for the general public for the need to hold confidential consultations with representatives of sector leaders. All over the world, lobbies are involved in working out a bill, not when a bill is ready. Incidentally, a similar situation exists in other sectors where people with a need to know are likely to learn what concessions the cabinet made to reach its cherished goal only after Ukraine becomes a WTO member.
