You're reading: Ukraine to discuss review of Association Agreement with EU in 2020

Ukraine plans to discuss the update of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement (AA) in 2020 in three key areas, Deputy Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture Minister, Ukraine’s Trade Representative Taras Kachka has said.

“The Association Agreement reads that it can be updated once every five years. This is Article 25 of the AA, it deals directly with trade in goods. However, we believe that this is an occasion to update the agreement in general, which we talked about with EU in November. We want three blocks of updates,” Kachka told Interfax-Ukraine on the sidelines of the Ukrainian Breakfast in Davos, organized by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.

The first block is a thoughtful update of some sections of the document.

“We have a section on environment, social policy, trade and sustainable development. Now, they all depend on how the Green Deal develops in the EU. We want the climate policy in the EU not to create an ecological border between Ukraine and the EU. Therefore we want to substantively update these sections,” the trade representative told Interfax-Ukraine.

The second part is to update the approach to trade, in particular agricultural products.

“We believe that the issue is not in fees and codes, but in how much we coordinate the development of agricultural policy. If we have production of some goods growing and we start exporting it to the EU (like tomatoes), Italian farmers start call for a fight with Ukraine in general. We are interested in establishing such mechanisms for the early exchange of information about what trends we have in agriculture so that we do not scare the EU and it does not scare us. We are two powerful exporters of agricultural products, and it is simply not possible to solve everything here with the help of duties. Based on how we communicate, we will talk about increasing access to markets for agricultural products,” he said.