Situation with closed markets during the quarantine period opened one of the most serious problems for Ukrainian small and medium agrarians' enterprises: trade canal for products which are made by them.

2/3 of all Ukrainian grains are exported abroad, but situation with vegetables and fruit is different: a lot of producers sale them inside the country. And, practically, the only one canel for such products sale, except for processing companies, are markets in small and big cities. After the last two weeks, when markets didn’t have an opportunity to work because of quarantine abridgment, markets were opened, but lots of rathe-ripes were lost.

We will avoid this situation, if agrarian producers unite into cooperatives. That will help them to make consignments big enough to sale it for supermarket chains, as the world does. Today, small and medium agriculture producers are fence off from this sale canel – one producer can’t cover the requirements of store chains because it doesn’t grow so much. 

“What does store chains need? They need consignment to be big enough, it should be the same quality and has the same price, after that it can be saled. Store chains don’t buy products for each shop separately, they buy it at once for all shops. And our small and medium agriculture producers could act as a great competitor for importers and big agriculture producers: quality and price isn't worse. The same thing is with exporters. For example: you have big tomatoes consignment of the same sort, size, quality – so you can reach international markets, get better contracts from processing companies or, at last, be such a company. Our world – it’s the world of industrial production. But for big commercial supply we need big consignment of the same quality.” – the Deputy Chairman of UAC Myhailo Sokolov explains us.

The problem is that according to modern legislation about cooperation we can’t realize such a way: agriculturae cooperative has no rights to buy production of their juridical members. For production realization, cooperative must give and sign the procuratory with every member. Of course, it’s unreal. Score chain will never work according to this way. It’s very difficult and riskily: we don’t know who will have responsibility, if one of the cooperative members doesn’t give a production or just doesn’t give it with the same quality?  

Nowadays, a draft plan of the law about agriculture cooperation (№0856) wait for consideration in the second reading in the Verhovna Rada of Ukraine. Its items should lead cooperation activity in Ukraine to the international standards. As a result, cooperative actions can be simplified. Small and medium agriculture producers will get an opportunity to sale their production to cooperatives, make big consignments, find new canels of its sale and don’t be dependent upon production markets.