Debate on the current situation of the EU agricultural markets in light of the war in Ukraine

The current situation of the EU agricultural markets following the war in Ukraine was one of the main topics at the plenary meeting of the Natural Resources Section of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR) held on 31 March. The meeting saw the participation of FAO’s Markets and Trade Division Deputy Director, Josef Schmidhuber.

At the opening of the event, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and Member of the European Parliamentary Alliance against Hunger and Malnutrition, Herbert Dorfmann, presented a resolution of the European Parliament that stressed the need for an urgent EU action plan to ensure food security inside and outside of the European Union. He underlined the importance of restoring stability in Ukraine, to ensure the recovery of its agricultural sector and the country’s food security. He also made clear the significant impacts of the dramatic increase in fertilizer prices on the agrifood sector as whole.

European Commission Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development (DG AGRI) Director of Strategy and Policy Analysis Tassos Haniotis, explained that the European Union is both the world’s biggest importer and exporter of agricultural products and that it is ‘more than self-sufficient’. During his intervention, FAO’s Josef Schmidhuber noted that the Russian Federation and Ukraine are both among the most important producers of agricultural commodities worldwide. In the cereal sector, their contribution to global production is particularly significant for barley, wheat and maize. Concerning the price of fertilizer, the FAO Deputy Director stressed that this was already an issue before the conflict, but that the recent escalations have the potential to extend the problem into the next years, as lower availability of fertilizer would translate to a lower yield and lower crop quality in the future.

The discussions will feed into the CoR opinion on the European Commission’s communication on Safeguarding Food Security and Reinforcing the Resilience of Food Systems.

Read the latest information on FAO’s response in Ukraine here.