"(For) all the farmers all over Ukraine, I think on average they lost like up to 15%, around 15% of their labour force to the army." "Out of the 350 employees, there are 40 in the army, not all of them on the front lines but, yeah, we miss them," Huizinga said in front of his fleet of combine harvesters. On his 15,000 hectares of land he has 2,000 milking cows plus young stock, and grows a variety of vegetable and grain crops, having withstood unpredictable weather and price fluctuations among other challenges over the years.Ī new recruitment drive since the start of this year as Ukraine prepares for a widely expected counteroffensive coincided with the annual sowing campaign, which was delayed because of heavy rains. The 48-year-old, who hails from near the Dutch city of Groningen and moved to Ukraine drawn by its cheaper land prices, said the losses could run to a few hundred thousand dollars or more for his farm. "You lose some efficiency there," Huizinga said. Most of the farming sources Reuters spoke to said they can get by with replacement workers and employees doubling up on some jobs, but that nothing replaces experience. Steps by Kyiv to ring-fence the key agriculture sector from the military draft have had only a limited impact. Ukraine's grain output - long a driver of its export revenues and of global grain markets, is already down sharply because of a war that has disrupted exports, reduced access to fertilisers and made huge swathes of farmland inaccessible. They said that assessing the impact of staff shortages on output is all but impossible - but just another complication in an already difficult campaign. Three farmers, a major farm operator and an agrarian association told Reuters the military call-up had made the most important times of the arable calendar - the sowing and harvesting seasons - even more tough.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |