October 7 2005, 15:33 APK-Inform

Ukraine to behave "aggressively" on new grain sales markets - Yushchenko

One of the key points of the farm policy of Ukraine in 2006 should be "aggressive" exploration of new grain sales market, Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko said at a meeting with regional media October 7.

According to Yushchenko, the primary task of Ukraine is to make itself established on the grain markets of Africa and Southern Asia. The attractiveness of these regions, in Yushchenko's words, is explained by traditionally high consumption of grain and by the fact that grain purchases here are usually made under state orders.

The head of nation emphasised that exploration of the new grain markets for Ukrainian grain was one of the key points of comprehensive strategy of Ukraine's farm policy realisation for the year 2006, which, according to Yushchenko, was going to be finalised and made available as a whole in a 30-day term.

He made a special stress on the point that virtually all the government's ministries were to be involved in working out of this strategy.

"Not a single ministry will be excluded from working out the agrarian policy for 2006 - from Interior Ministry through the Ministry of Education (as regards state order for trained professionals) - all of them are required to contribute into the rural life", he said.

He also said that a comprehensive approach was needed in realisation of the strategy of internal agricultural policy in the country.

In this direction, Yushchenko said, the first-order task was to complete the process of farmland plots privatisation, because now "one million peasants had no allocated land shares, documented by a state property certificate", and this results in "blockage of the hypothecary system".

"When land privatisation has been completed, we'll have to move to organisation of hypothecary operations, and then - start caring about "organisation of land market", the President said.

In this respect, he said, an especially important issue was creation of efficient insurance policy in the farm sector of Ukraine.