Hungarian agri minister backs supporting Ukraine’s grain exports

The Hungarian government is working hard to help Kyiv sell grain abroad, said Agriculture Minister István Nagy, who described the instability of Ukraine’s grain export in light of Russia’s invasion as an “emergency”.

“We have an emergency situation, I can put it that way because in Ukraine, the area under crops has decreased, the amount of crops has decreased, and we cannot harvest what we have,” Nagy told RTL Híradó on Sunday (22 May), Telex reported.

“We are working very hard on how we can find a way to open the way for Ukrainian grain to the rest of the world by land”, he added.

The minister said that the impact of the Russian-Ukrainian war in Hungary is not felt in the shortage of stocks but in rising prices, and the government is therefore working to create opportunities for the export of Ukrainian produce around the world.

The government announced on 4 March, after the war broke out, that it would ban all grain exports from Hungary. Instead, however, in a decree, it made the export of certain grain crops subject to registration and secured itself the right of pre-emptive purchases of grain meant for export, which it has so not made use of.

The agriculture minister has now said that the measure was not intended to stop exports but only to register stocks.