At the moment we hear everywhere in the media something about the war between Russia and Ukraine, we are shown the consequences of the war, talk about what Ukraine or Russia should have done again, that Selenskyj demands something again, wants to have more aid money, then we have the whole sanctions, the energy crisis and so on, all these things dominate the media at the moment!
What I want to focus on in this article is unfortunately not mentioned at all in the public reporting. It is about the fact more than a year ago, exactly in July 2021, Selenskyi allowed the sale of agricultural land from abroad. The fact is before 2001 there was a short period when foreigners were allowed to purchase agricultural land in Ukraine. After that, in 2001, there was a moderium, that is, a postponement of the whole situation for a period when these transactions were prohibited.
Since July 2021, this trade has been permitted again - in other words, precisely during wartime, when land prices naturally collapse - and since then, more than a quarter of Ukraine's agricultural land has been bought up by three U.S. companies. These companies include Cargill, a very large food and feed producer, then we have DuPont, one of the largest chemical companies in the world, and we have Monsanto, probably the best-known company, which was bought up in 2008 by Bayer, the largest producer of seeds in the world.
These three companies have already acquired 28%, or just over a quarter, of the agricultural land in Ukraine. According to the Australia National Review, Cargill, DuPont and Monsanto together have already bought 17 of the 62 million hectares of arable land in Ukraine. So, if you have followed this issue in principle, then you also know the ukrainien president Wolodymyr Selenskyj has said this issue, which has been postponed for so long, must of course be solved democratically and, of course, the Ukrainians must be able to have their say!
In case anyone doesn't know, about 81% of Ukrainians don't want that! The majority of Ukrainian people want Ukrainian farmland to be available to Ukrainian citizens, but they do not want foreign companies to be able to drive up prices - e.g. because they want to speculate a lot or acquire a lot - just as they do not want these companies to be able to start their experiments in Ukraine without Ukrainians having any say in the matter.
81% were clearly against it, yet this law was passed, "coincidentally" just before the war, which lowers prices for land and agricultural land, so that one could think, in view of this timing, that there was some calculation behind it.
What needs to be mentioned in this context is that agriculture is very important for this country. 14% of Ukrainian workers work in the agricultural sector and agricultural production is Ukraine's main export. The problems with grain production have shown us that, also the increasing lack of food in Africa, due to closed borders and resulting lack of grain exports from Ukraine and also Russia have made the agricultural importance of these countries in the world very clear.
Now at the moment, because of these problems, a grain agreement was reached between these countries, so that the first productions could be exported from the countries again. The problem that three large U.S. companies simply control more than a quarter of the Ukrainian agricultural market has not yet been solved, but no one seems to be too interested in the public state media.
If you've traced the history of big business in agriculture a little bit basically, you know there's still a lot which can happen that's detrimental to the population.
The question that arises now is: Why did this happen in the first place and what was the IMF's involvement? The International Monetary Fund had already told the Ukrainian government they should liberalize their markets, in other words, open them up to foreign markets, because that would be beneficial for the economy. Whether this had an advantage for the Ukrainian economy? Quite clearly NO! But they have prophesied it in such a way, one must do now something, one must push Ukraine now and the IMF has suddenly no more guilt, because he has pronounced only "nice recommendations".
The IMF, which is often portrayed in the media as the great savior and helper of Ukraine, is in reality only a lender with conditions like those just mentioned. Also in other countries, as for example the Netherlands, we can observe quite similar procedures, there for any climate goals new laws are passed, and already the farmers are partly expropriated, before however still politely faced with the choice put, faithfully the slogan: Do it voluntarily, or we expropriate you!
In the USA we see one of the biggest owners of arable land is a Bill Gates. Globally, the situation is no different, with Jeff Bezos owning huge tracts of farmland that far exceed even those owned by Bill Gates. Now one can speculate about it, what these people of all things intend with it, except with it simply to continue to operate agriculture, because how and under which (profitable) conditions this is operated, is then naturally left to those, which has appropriated enormous amounts of these fields!
Since such information about "false friends" (keyword: USA/american companies VS Ukraine) and pseudo-philanthropists is systematically hushed up in the state radio, it seems all the more important to inform as many people as possible about such events, so that in the end everyone can decide for himself whether they are pure coincidences or whether there are bad intentions behind them.