After more than a year of surprisingly solid European unity in support of Ukraine, the grains of discord are piling up in the barn of Robert Vieru, a Romanian farmer with 500 tons of wheat and 250 tons of sunflower seeds that now remain unsold due to the reduced price Ukrainian competition.
An overabundance of Ukrainian grains and other products has almost halved the value of the results of Vieru’s work and farmers across Eastern and Central Europe – and their governments, most of which have elections this year or next – are caught between solidarity with Ukraine and their own survival.
“I am sad for them, but my heart breaks for myself,” Mr Vieru said of Ukrainians living across the nearby border in Romania’s Danube Delta, opening the sliding door of a concrete shed, which was filled to the brim. was with last year’s unsold products. harvest.
Prices have been driven so low by a tidal wave of cheap food from Ukraine, he said, that selling would mean he would earn less than he paid to produce his crops.
Mr Vieru’s plight, shared by farmers in Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria, stems from the unintended consequences of good intentions gone awry.
Market forces driven by profiteering have turned an ambitious effort by the European Union to help Ukraine export its harvest and alleviate what the United Nations described last year as an “unprecedented global hunger crisis” into a source of political division and economic unrest in Europe’s former communist eastern countries.
The mess has not erased strong public support for Ukraine, at least not yet, but it has created an opening for far-right groups favorable to Russia, caused serious friction within the European bloc and soured moods in a region that is a stronghold of mostly not continued support for Ukraine. A European Commission proposal of €100 million to compensate farmers has done little to ease tensions.
With the exception of Hungary, whose populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has often collaborated with Russia, the countries hardest hit by competition are among Ukraine’s staunchest European allies. Poland, Romania and Slovakia have provided weapons and military training.
In the past week, however, all five countries have imposed severe restrictions on imports of Ukrainian grain, with only Romania imposing an outright ban.
“We are the last man standing,” Romania’s Transport Minister Sorin Grindeanu said in an interview.