Trade in food products with Russia remains a sensitive issue for the EU, the European Commissioner for Agriculture said.
Imports of Russian agricultural products to the EU last year reached 2.5 million tons, but the European Union is taking additional measures to limit Russian grain imports. This was announced by the European Commissioner for Agriculture Janusz Wojciechowski, reports Ukrinform.
“Regarding trade with Russia, the EU recently established some barriers to it and introduced tariffs that reduce imports (of grain) from Russia. The total volume of such imports throughout the European Union will reach almost 2.5 million tons in 2022 – 1 million tons of grain and 1.5 million tons of sunflower. This volume remained almost unchanged in 2023. The largest importer of Russian grain is Italy – 478 thousand tons, the Latvia is in second place – 360 thousand tons, Lithuania also received a certain amount, but now it refuses to continue this import,” said the European Commissioner.
Wojciechowski added that Estonia also imported a small part of Russian grain products last year, and for Poland the amount of such imports was 3,500 tons of grain and 4,000 tons of sunflower, which is a very small amount of agricultural imports. The import of agricultural products from Russia to Hungary and Slovakia remained at a low level.
Wojciechowski recalled that food trade with Russia remains a sensitive issue for the EU.
“We are now open to introducing restrictions on (agricultural) imports from Russia. But we must remember that trade goes the same way. The European Union exports €7 billion worth of products agriculture in Russia in 2023 and imported €2 billion worth of goods from there. We must take this factor into account. This trade situation in Russia is different from what we have in Ukraine . In 2023, our (agricultural) imports from Ukraine reached 11.5 billion euros, but we exported to Ukraine about 3 billion. ” minus ” reached 8.5 billion euros,” said European Commissioner.
It was previously reported that exports of agricultural products to the EU fell by 1 million tons.
Source: korrespondent
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