Ukraine successfully completes sowing campaign, agrarians concerned about fuel shortage - Ukrainian Agrarian Council deputy head

MOSCOW. June 8 (Interfax) - Ukraine has successfully completed the 2022 sowing campaign, and now the agrarians are concerned mostly about a possible shortage of fuel to harvest the crops.

"While we had some fuel reserves to conduct the spring campaign, now we have difficulties related to the insufficient amount of supplies. Therefore, task number one facing the Cabinet of Ministers, the relevant ministry, and us as specialized associations is to provide the agrarians with fuels and lubricants," Ukrainian Agrarian Council Deputy Chairman Denys Marchuk said on the Ukraina media center on Wednesday.

Ukrainian media quoted Marchuk as saying that Ukraine has attained some success in providing itself with fuels and lubricants by facilitating the passage of fuel trucks and trains carrying fuel through border crossing points in a priority manner.

This measure should provide Ukrainian agrarians with fuel for two to three weeks before starting to harvest winter crops, Marchuk said.

"In fact, we have managed to conduct the spring sowing campaign. There were more negative forecasts at the start of the campaign, we thought we would be able to sow about 60% of [land] compared to previous year, but the figure turned out to be better, and we sowed about 75% of last year's area. This shows that, as an agrarian country, we are capable of providing ourselves with food and exporting grain and oil-yielding crops," he said.

As reported earlier, Ukraine sowed 13.18 million hectares of land with key agricultural crops, which makes 91% of the 14.4 million hectares planned for being sowed in the current season. Over the week from May 26 to June 2 alone, 0.54 million hectares was sown.

As of June 2, the area under sunflower amounted to 4.27 million hectares (87% of the 4.93 million hectares planned to be sown in 2022), corn 4.57 million hectares (94% of 4.85 hectares), summer barley 948,300 hectares (93% of 1.02 million hectares), summer wheat 189,300 hectares (99.7% of 189,600 hectares), oats 157,400 hectares (96% of 164,600 hectares), and peas 130,600 hectares (89% of 145,700 hectares).

The areas under potatoes amounted to 1.11 million hectares (93% of the planned 1.19 million hectares), soybean 1.19 million hectares (95% of 1.25 million hectares), sugar beet 182,100 hectares (88% of 206,900 hectares), summer rapeseed 32,400 hectares (98% of 33,200 hectares), panicum 47,300 hectares (76% of 62,300 hectares), and buckwheat 68,800 hectares (84% of 81,600 hectares).