Poland made a serious mistake in letting Ukrainian grain flow into Poland before the embargo was enforced, the country’s former agriculture minister, Jan Krzysztof Ardanowski, who is presently an adviser to Polish President Andrzej Duda, has told Do Rzeczy weekly magazine.
“That mistake has led to the government having to spend billions of Polish złoty to help farmers,” said Ardanowski.
The former minister expressed his concern that should the uncontrolled inflow of Ukrainian grain onto the Polish market occur once more, it would result in bankruptcy for many farmers. Uncontrolled transit of Ukrainian grain could spell the death knell for Polish farming, he warned.
Ardanowski pointed to the fact that grain produced in Ukraine is owned mainly by multinational corporations that profit from its sale, more than the people of Ukraine.
“Ukrainian politicians attacking Poland over the grain embargo are not protecting the interests of their farmers but those of international companies,” he claimed, adding that these companies are engaged in intensive lobbying to force Ukrainian grain onto the EU’s markets.
Ardanowski agreed that unleashing uncontrolled grain imports from Ukraine is also a part of the arsenal of the green lobby to bury agriculture in the EU that it sees as highly emissive. This threatens food security in Europe and would make the community dependent on imports, something the Common Agricultural Policy was designed to prevent.
In this way, the green ideology is also useful for international corporations that wish to see food from the Americas, Australasia, and Ukraine dominate in the large European market.
The former agriculture minister stated that without food self-sufficiency there is no real sovereignty for Poland, adding that the EU seems hostile to food security and he is surprised that the Polish agriculture commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, has not done more to counter that hostility.
Ardanowski is standing for parliament again as a Law and Justice (PiS) candidate and hopes that his party has learned the lessons of the grain crisis. He fears that the opposition has no clue as to what should be done and would just toe the line of the EU mainstream without offering any resistance.
The former minister also expressed his outrage over Donald Tusk’s decision to put the militant farmers’ leader, Michał Kołodziejczak, on his liberal election slate, calling him “Tusk’s puppet.” He claimed that Kołodziejczak has traded in credibility as a farmers’ leader for a place in parliament, where he will not be able to do anything for those he purports to represent.
