Seventy years ago, every national school pupil knew Ukraine was the bread basket of Europe. They knew too that it was also the sugar bowl of Europe. But all that was pre-EU days, and before the Cold War got such a grip on us. But today, Ukraine is facing an unprecedented agricultural and economic crisis, more a basket case than a bread basket.

Properly farmed, Ukraine has the capacity to feed the world. But currently, the country is undergoing a catastrophic meltdown in agricultural production. If this crisis continues for too much longer, it will soon struggle to feed its own people.

All reports from Ukraine confirm this could happen soon. The causes are not hard to find. Specifically, the profitability and the productivity of all agricultural crops in Ukraine has plummeted over the last three years. The picture gets even worse as we await the outcome of the 2016 harvest.

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The omens are not good. Production from Ukraine’s strategic wheat and sugar beet crops are in freefall. For the second year running, Ukraine’s 2016 wheat harvest will come in well down on last year.

Specifically, last year’s Ukrainian wheat crop was 6.2% down on the year before (2014). We are now looking at Ukraine’s wheat production coming in at 18.5m tonnes this year. This is 8m tonnes less than the last year’s crop, a 30% fall in just one year alone. This represent a net loss in export sales value to Ukraine of c. €1.5 billion.

Sugar beet

The plight of Ukraine’s sugar beet industry is even worse. Downward trends continue to spiral out of control. For a variety of reasons, Ukraine’s sugar beet growers have been forced to slash their production of this once highly lucrative crop.

Thirty years ago, Ukraine was growing 1.6m hectares of sugar beet. By 2010, this was down by 63% to 600,000 hectares – a loss of 1m hectares. Last year, Ukraine’s sugar beet crop shrunk by another 44% to 237,000ha. From this they harvested a total of just over 10m tonnes of sugar beet. That was Ukraine’s worst sugar beet crop in the last 25 years.

As in Ireland, the demise of the sugar beet crop is a huge loss to Ukrainian farmers. Historically, Ukraine produced practically all of the sugar for the whole of the Soviet Union. The whole of the Russian and Soviet Union markets are now lost to Ukraine and they’re never coming back. Accordingly, Ukraine is now down to producing 1.5m tonnes of white sugar a year, half of what they were producing 30 years ago.

Undoubtedly, Russia must bear the lion’s share of the blame and the shame for the disaster now breaking out all over The Ukraine. But the Ukraine’s own corrupt politicians are also guilty. Furthermore, Europe and the US cannot wash their hands of The Ukraine’s calamitous and shameful downfall.

Brendan Dunleavy has over 20 years of practical livestock farming and agribusiness project management experience in Russia and Ukraine.