“….Zelensky called on “western investors”…. to become “stakeholders, shareholders of the success of a new Ukraine”…”

Ukraine - The real story behind the crisis

“….Ukraine was important agriculturally during the era of the Soviet Union. Now its resources are being recognised by the west and in particular US agricultural corporations.

Ukraine has some of the most fertile soils in the world, due to minimal impacts of the industrial farming model that is much more extensive in the west. This has made Ukraine an attractive proposition for Global agricultural interests. Investment is relatively inexpensive.

However outright ownership of Ukrainian land is restricted due to a moratorium on land sales. According to the law, foreign nationals and legal persons (private corporations) may lease land, but they are not allowed to own agricultural land. Essentially the main owners of land in Ukraine are traditional farmers (see below).

A full background on the moratorium can be found in a 2014 report published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, 

 𝗔𝘁𝘁𝗶𝘁𝘂𝗱𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗟𝗶𝗳𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘂𝗺 𝗼𝗻 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗮𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗨𝗸𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝗲.

At this point the Ukrainian people are protected from the International Ag Cartel. But you can bet your booties once they join the EU with EU law having supremacy over national law they will no longer be protected. F. William Engdahl writes of this cabal of less than a dozen Ag giants in The WTO and the Politics of GMO. Engdahl is “…an independent publicist who has written extensively on GATT and EU agriculture issues since 1984…”

…..

Julian Rose tells us what the EU and that thrice damned Ag Cartel DOES once they get a country into the EU.

The Battle to Save the Polish CountrysideJulian Rose exposes the scandal of EU’s deliberate policy to get rid of family farms for the benefit of the corporations and gives a personal account of his battle with the GMO dragon that threatens to devastate rural Poland

…The communists failed to quell the small Polish peasant farmers into submission during their period of occupation, which left the Country with a rich, if rather confusing, legacy of approximately one and a half million small scale family farms (average size 18 acres) dotted around the Polish Provinces, but particularly prevalent in the south and east….

Through the auspices of a senior civil servant in Warsaw, Jadwiga and I were able to address a meeting with the Brussels-based committee responsible for negotiating Poland’s agricultural terms of entry into the EU. It proved to be an ominous foretaste of things to come.

The first thing that struck us was the fact that out of the twelve people sitting in the room at the European Commission, not one was Polish. I explained to the attendant body that in a Country where 22 percent of the working population are involved in agriculture, and the majority on small farms, it would not be a good idea to follow the same regime as had been operated in the UK and other EU member countries, in which ‘restructuring’ agriculture had involved throwing the best farmers off the land and amalgamating their farms into large scale monocultural operations designed to supply the predatory supermarket chains. You could have heard a pin drop.

After clearing her throat and leaning slowly forward, the chair-lady said: “I don’t think you understand what EU policy is. Our objective is to ensure that farmers receive the same salary parity as white collar workers in the cities. The only way to achieve this is by restructuring and modernising old fashioned Polish farms to enable them to compete with other countries agricultural economies and the global market. To do this it will be necessary to shift around one million farmers off the land and encourage them to take city and service industry jobs to improve their economic position. The remaining farms will be made competitive with their counterparts in western Europe.”

There in a nutshell you have the whole tragic story of the clinically instigated demise of European farming over the past three decades. We protested that with unemployment running at 20 percent how would one provide jobs for another million farmers dumped on the streets of Warsaw? This was greeted with a stony silence, eventually broken by a lady from Portugal, who rather quietly remarked that since Portugal joined the European Union, 60 percent of small farmers had already left the land. “The European Union is simply not interested in small farms,” she said….

A month or so later, we were invited to the Polish parliament to address the government’s agricultural committee. I gave a speech entitled, “Don’t Follow Us”, in which I explicitly warned of the fate in store for the Polish countryside if Poland joined the EU. I gave some vivid examples of what had happened in the UK over the past two decades: the ripping up of 35 000 miles of hedge rows; the loss of 30 percent of native farmland bird species; 98 percent of species-rich hay meadows, thousands of tonnes of wind and water eroded top-soil, and around fifteen thousand farmers driven off the land every year, accompanied by a rapid decline in the quality of food…..

Poland joined the EU in 2004 after an intense publicity campaign calling on Poles to “Say Yes to the EU!” The propaganda machine went into overdrive with brash promises of “pots of gold” being showered on Poland and farmers being offered generous agricultural subsidies and free advice, provided they played by the rules of the game…

That ’game’ was all too familiar to me. Spend hours out of your working day filling in endless forms, filing maps and measuring every last inch of your fields, tracks and farmsteads; applying for ‘passports’ for your cattle and ear tags for your sheep and pigs; re-siting the slurry pit and putting stainless steel and washable tiles on the dairy walls; becoming versed in HASAP hygiene and sanitary rules and applying them where any food processing was to take place; and living under the threat of convictions and fines should one put a finger out of place or be late in supplying some official details