REUTERS
Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk predicts that Russia may completely close its market for Ukrainian agricultural exports in 2016 when the agreement on a free trade zone between Ukraine and the European Union comes into force.
As of now, the share of Ukrainian goods exported to Russia is not more than 2% of total exports, he told reporters on Friday.
"The more we increase exports, the smaller Russia's share will be. In the past years they have been doing their utmost to reduce Ukrainian exports on their markets. They thought we would fail to find news markets, but we did not. Regular violations by Russia of an agreement on a free trade zone in fact made Ukrainian agriculture become more competitive, more efficient, seek and win new markets. Therefore Russia has ceased to be a decisive market for the Ukrainian agricultural sector," Yatsenyuk said.
"And now, as far as I understand, they [Russia] want to completely close the market for us after the agreement on the free trade zone [with the EU] fully comes into force on January 1, 2016, and exports fall to zero then. But we'll continue looking for new markets and boost exports there," he said.
As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian Agriculture Minister Oleksiy Pavlenko announced that the Russian market accounted for 2% of Ukrainian farm exports in the first half of 2015 against 8% in the same period of 2014. Exports to Russia in the first six months of 2015 in absolute terms amounted to $125 million, which was 80% down year-over-year.
At the same time, Ukrainian exports to the rest of the world totaled $6.5 billion.
According to Pavlenko, Ukrainian farmers now choose EMEA and U.S. markets in preference to Russia.
In 2010-2014, Ukraine's trade with Russia shrank by 40%.