Government officials are asked to prevent crop failures

The "All-Ukrainian Agrarian Forum" appealed to the Prime Minister of Ukraine Denys Shmyhal and the Minister of Finance Serhiy Marchenko with a request to extend the period of preferential lending under the "5-7-9 Affordable Loans" program.

In the statement of the Forum, quoted by a number of media, it was emphasized that preferential lending helped farmers to survive during the war in Ukraine. If the situation changes, it may lead to spring sowing being able to fail.

"According to the relevant resolutions of the CMU, preferential lending was granted for a period of up to one year and in the amount of up to UAH 90 million per business entity. If it is not extended, about UAH 38 billion in loans to agro-industrial producers will be forced to be returned even before the end of the sowing campaign, and this is when agricultural enterprises need approximately UAH 40 billion in an additional order to ensure the sowing campaign of 2023", - it is reported in the appeal.

However, experts note, if the Government does not continue the preferential program, then we should expect a reduction of 5-5.5 million hectares. In order to prevent such a situation from developing, agricultural producers asked to extend the terms of the loans that were issued and to increase the limit of lending volumes to UAH 180 million per business entity and taking into account persons related to it.

"However, these requests have not yet been implemented," the statement said.

In order for the sowing campaign to be successful, it is worth continuing the state program "Affordable loans 5-7-9", agrarians urge.

It should be noted that this year Ukrainian farmers have already received over UAH 9.5 billion in loans from commercial banks. According to the press service of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy, 4 billion 260 million UAH were provided under the program "Affordable loans 5-7-9", and 17.2 million UAH were received under the program of state guarantees in the amount of 80%. The largest volume of loans was received by farmers of Kyiv Oblast (5.2 billion UAH), Dnipropetrovsk Oblast (597 million UAH), Kirovohrad Oblast (542 million UAH), Vinnytsia Oblast (512 million UAH) and Odesa Oblast (487 million UAH).

We will remind that under the State program "Affordable loans 5-7-9%" the Entrepreneurship Development Fund concluded cooperation agreements with 42 banks.