The Union of Chemists of Ukraine is not involved in the initiative of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDCU) to ban imports of fertilizers originating in Russia, said the president of this organization Serhiy Golubov within the framework of the V International Agri Invest Forum Conference of Agrarian Investors on May 16 in Kyiv.

"I can assure you that we are not involved in this. It was probably a state policy," he said, acknowledging that agrarians need time to find new suppliers of fertilizers.

Mikhail Sokolov, deputy head of the Ukrainian Agrarian Council (UAC), noted that the policy of limiting fertilizer imports to the Russian Federation has nothing to do with protecting national interests, as raw materials for the production of fertilizers within the country are, again, Russian gas and ammonia.

"We are saying that it's bad to buy fertilizers in an aggressor country. But what do we do with these fertilizers? We produce them not even from gas, but from ammonia manufactured by the Russian oligarch Arkady Rotenberg, who is under US sanctions. It is hard to find a man who would be closer to Putin," Sokolov said.

At present, Russian producers cover 21.8% of domestic nitrogen fertilizer consumption in Ukraine and 77.3% - phosphorus fertilizers.

According to Sokolov, the sudden disappearance of Russian fertilizers from the Ukrainian market will cause their acute shortage, which will not be promptly completed and will lead to a sharp rise in prices in the domestic market. In Ukraine, prices for fertilizers on the domestic market are 40-50% more than the world prices.

Sokolov confirmed that domestic plants, in present conditions, cannot reduce the prices of fertilizers because of their own non-competitiveness, since they are forced to make them from expensive gas or ammonia. Because of this, the cost of the Ukrainian finished product significantly exceeds the cost of fertilizers produced in China, the Middle East, Russia, etc.

Therefore, the only way out of the situation is to provide the plants with its own raw material base - by providing chemical support for domestic blue fuel at cost and construction of synthesis plants that will produce fertilizers from gas coals that are available in Ukraine in surplus.

Note. According to a research conducted by the NSC "Institute of Agrarian Economics", the consulting agency "Ukragroconsult" and the "Social Monitoring" center on request of the UAC, the loss of the domestic agricultural sector due to the lack of yield due to the high prices for nitrogen fertilizers inside the country, is made annually more than UAH 32 billion.

Because of the high prices for fertilizers, farmers use them much less than normal. As a result, Ukrainian soils are being depleted - every year, every hectare of Ukrainian agricultural land loses from 200 to 400 kg of nutrients.