February 2024 overview: the Polish Egg and Chicken War
Views on the trade war from liberal and Keynesian experts, deep dive into the composition of Polish-Ukrainian trade, demands to limit agricultural production and return to neocolonial tariffs
With February over, it’s time for a dive into recent events in Ukraine. The western media is, as always, fairly saturated with Ukraine coverage, but there’s always something important that slips under the radar.
first of all, the front - the western one. There is no more hope that Poland’s new liberal, pro-western government will put an end to the farmer-led blockade of Ukraine’s agricultural exports.
Attempts by both governments to solve the situation so far appear fruitless. Polish leadership cautioned Ukrainian politicians against ‘emotional outbursts’ and reminded them that ‘both Ukrainian soldiers and Polish farmers are in a struggle for survival’. Naturally, this last statement was hardly reassuring to Ukrainian public opinion.
Zelensky’s appeals to meet at the border were even rebuffed by Polish leadership openly, who stated that this would be ‘unsafe’. Prime Minister Shmyhal’s expedition to the Polish border left him empty-handed, with his Polish counterparts refusing to come. They advised meeting instead in Poland’s capital. Such a recommendation seems to undercut the intention of Shmyhal’s statement, which claimed that meeting at the border would underscore Poland and Ukraine’s status as ‘equal partners and allies’.
The reality of the situation is quite serious. On February 22, Ukrainian transport officials stated that the border situation was leading to delays on the train network. By February 25, Ukrainian border officials stated that 2400 Ukrainian trucks were stuck at the border crossings with Poland. At certain border crossings, truckers reported that they had been stuck for up to 230 hours. There has been at least one case of a Ukrainian trucker dying in his car while waiting to cross.
February 21 saw the third case of Polish attacks on Ukrainian transport within Poland. According to the Ukrainian border service, by the morning of February 22, 600 trucks were stuck at the Yagodin-Dorokhusk border crossing, with not a single truck being able to cross the border in the past day. Only 313 out of 4400 trucks had been able to cross the Krakovets-Korchova crossing, and only 50 out of 600 were able to cross at Rava-Ruskaya-Khrebene. At the current speed of the Shehyni-Medyka crossing, trucks will have to wait 26 days to cross.
This is a much more serious situation than the blockade of the previous year. Last year, only trucks were blocked, but now passenger buses and light transport is also unable to move. There have even been cases where humanitarian shipments were blocked. Last year’s blockade also did not witness the dramatic actions of recent days
The blockade is set to accelerate. ‘Solidarnost’, the Polish trade union of cold-war fame, announced that it planned to block train and sea routes in March.
But what actually drives this entire crisis? According to one particularly self-assured Ukrainian ‘expert’ interviewed by Yuri Romanenko, the problem is that Poland’s farmers are incompetent, their existence propped up by the EU nanny state. Needless to say, this attempt to ‘explain the situation’ was not greeted positively in the comments by Poles, who accused said gentleman of being paid off by Ukraine’s titanic agroholdings. Unfortunately, the video seems to have been deleted now.
Aleksey Kusch, the lone Keynesian voice in the whirlwind of Ukrainian libertarianism, has a more interesting analysis. According to him, Ukraine’s totally liberalized agriculture makes it quite unsuitable for the EU. Ukraine has some of the biggest industrial agriculture and animal farms in the world, putting latin american latifundistas to shame. The EU’s pampered individual farmers can’t compete. Of course, such a ‘success’ has come at the cost of Ukraine’s own, hardly pampered peasantry, who essentially no longer exist. The EU, whose whole raison d’etre is to protect the sensitive European market from the big mean world, is of course hardly interested in allowing Ukraine in.
Precisely because of all this, Pyotr Kulpa, a Polish expert, actually advised the Ukrainian analyst Yury Romanenko that Ukraine needn’t join the EU:
But when Russia intervened in 2022, the EU did the unthinkable
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