It is not customary to talk about this, but Polish fruit growers, on the one hand, demand to ban raspberry imports from Ukraine, but at the same time, they do not want Ukraine to ban imports of Polish fruits and other food products. At the time of signing the Association Agreement with the EU, Ukraine agreed to discriminatory trade rules with the EU, when the European market was protected from Ukrainian products by quotas and import duties, and, in response, Ukraine provided almost unlimited access for Polish products to its market.
And while Ukrainian farmers are harvesting their crops under round-the-clock shelling, losing their loved ones, Polish farmers are happily counting their profits by selling fresh pears and other fruits to those who launch rockets and shells at Ukrainians – Russian consumers. Moreover, these fruits are harvested in Polish gardens mainly by Ukrainians! For some reason, Polish growers do not organize any pickets and protests about such hypocritical approaches to business, and they also do not block the gates of packing centers where apples are being prepared for shipment to Russia through Belarus.
By the way, it’s not just about the apples and pears. Imagine that such a small country like Belarus is the second largest market for Polish fruits! Little Belarus, with a population of 9 million people, bought more fruits from Poland in the first four months of 2023 than the Netherlands, France, Belgium, or the UK! In addition to pears and apples, Poland also actively sells to the aggressors strawberries, frozen fruits, and berries, and also helps Spanish suppliers with re-exports of their citrus fruits, because oranges and tangerines are also on the list of Poland’s top export positions in the direction of aggressor countries, EastFruit notes.
Moreover, only apple and pear exports to Belarus in the first 3 months of 2023 brought Polish farmers $15 million in revenues, which is 2.3 times more than in the same period of 2022! Do you believe that all these fruits were sold to the small Belarus, from the territory of which, by the way, rockets are also flying to the Ukrainian cities?
Let’s say an even more interesting thing – for pear growers in Poland, it is Russia that remains the number one market! More Polish pears were sent to Russia in the first three months of 2023 than to any other country in the world! Second largest destination was Kazakhstan, which also has a reputation of a large transhipment point of sanctioned goods to Russia. Every month Poland ships about 10,000 tons of pears to the Russian market.
By the way, this hypocritical Polish business has been operating since 2014, after Russia imposed a food embargo on food imports from the EU, the USA and a number of other countries in 2014. True, there was a period when Belarus banned imports from Poland, but after the start of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian invaders, these bans were canceled without much advertising. Because the aggressors also need something to eat, and in this they are helped by growers from Poland using the hard-working Ukrainian seasonal workers.
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