Proceeds from this year’s agricultural exports estimated at 6 bln dollars

“We expect that during the current year every third dollar in Ukraine will be earned by the agricultural sector,” Yatseniuk said on Friday, meeting with top managers of companies engaged in agricultural exports. He said that this year’s grain harvest would be almost as rich as last year’s and, given the growing prices of agricultural products in global markets, hard currency earnings in the second half of this year would reach 4 billion dollars. Yatseniuk told reporters after the meeting that Russia’s likely embargo on food imports from Ukraine would not be painful for the country, as the share of the Russian market in Ukrainian agricultural exports has shrunk to 2%. “Next year, when the EU-Ukraine free trade agreement takes effect, Russia is most likely to impose a full embargo on food imports from Ukraine. As far as I understand, they will completely block their market for us, but the embargo will hardly affect our agricultural sector. We will find new markets for our increasing exports,” Yatsenyuk said. He also said he would meet with U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker in October to discuss investment in increasing food production in Ukraine.