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A week ago Ukraine’s
Deputy Minister of Agriculture, Yaroslav Krasnopolskiy, declared spring
planting would be all over in the next 7-10 days.
A week later and the
Ministry of Agriculture, Oleksiy Pavlenko, said he expected a successfully
completion of the planting campaign in two weeks.
What the Deputy
Minister failed to take in to account is that whatever amount of time someone
in Ukraine tells you anything will take, you need to double it, add a bit then wait
five more minutes.
The first Minister also reported
83% plantings are complete but registered some unwillingness amongst farmers to
plant extra buckwheat.
You may recall that ten
days ago he instructed his Heads of Administrations to instruct farmers to plant
an additional 50,000ha of the crop to avoid shortages and panic buying later in
the year – I presume by acknowledging the unwillingness of cash strapped farmers
to man the planters this hasn't happened.
Which in my mind at
least is indicative of a broader attempt to manage information on food availability
and security but does beg the question why address the buckwheat issue so publicly?
In the grand scheme
of things an extra 50,000ha of buckwheat isn't really all that and trying to
resolve it at Ministerial level when the country is bankrupt seems a bit like rearranging
the deckchairs on the Titanic.
Anyway, to stimulate
farmers to plant more buckwheat the PJSC Agrarian Fund has now begun to purchase forward
contracts, which is probably what should have been done ten days ago rather
than issuing declarations.