Hungarian farmers protested against unlimited Ukrainian agricultural imports – PHOTOS
Some 1,000 farmers protested on Friday near the Hungary-Ukraine border crossing at Záhony against the European Commission’s proposal to extend the unlimited imports of Ukrainian agricultural products by one year.
The protesters lined up hundreds of tractors and trucks along a 5km section of the road leading to the border station on both lanes blocking regular traffic. They put Hungarian flags on their vehicles and held up at the Záhony crossing banners with slogans criticising Brussels and the EC and expressing support for Hungarian agriculture.
István Jakab, the head of farmers’ association Magosz, said that “incompetent people” in Brussels were destroying Europe’s agricultural sector and the European people. He noted a similar demonstration staged against EU regulations by Hungarian farmers last September to protect the 5 million hectares of the country’s arable land.
Jakab said European farmers could not compete with Ukraine’s large producers and their off-shore registered foreign owners and investors “who want to put their hands on large sizes of arable land in Ukraine with Brussels’ help”. “And they want to first weaken and finally put their hands on the European market,” he added.
Balázs Győrffy, the head of the National Agricultural Chamber (NAK), called the EC’s proposal “absurd”, adding that “Brussels cannot force such a regulation onto Hungarian and other farmers in Europe”.
Read also:
- PM Orbán meets farmers protesting in Brussels – Read more HERE
Here are some photos:
No chemically treated Ukrainian agricultural products should be sold in Hungary. Hungary produces enough food. The country does not need Ukraine’s products that will probably cause more allergies in children. Sell the products in countries that do not produce enough food. It is time to close the border to Ukrainian trucks. The high volume of traffic raises the air pollution, that in itself is damaging to the population.
Austria, Germany, Holland need to import food, let Ukraine ship products to those countries.
It’s absolutely shocking that you can’t ship in so much as a paperclip from outside the E.U. without having to fill out a dozen long, complicated forms as well as pay an import duty (the Post Office regularly bills me even for 150 forints when I buy something from Israel, America or Great Britain), but you can flood the E.U. with crummy wheat, decimating an entire industry that’s already on its last legs, and that’s just a-okay. It just shows again that the E.U. is the enemy of the regular, ordinary people whose lives are harder today than at any time since the Second World War.