Government assessed the impact of drought on the harvest in Ukraine

The harvest of grain and oilseed crops in the southern regions will be 3-4 million tons lower due to the drought, which will affect exports. Deputy Minister of Economy, Environment and Agriculture Taras Vysotsky said this in an interview with BusinessCensor.

“Currently, exports are being formed at the level of 40 million tons of grain. If it were not for the drought, it would be 43 (million tons. — Ed.). If, conditionally, exports decrease by 8%, then globally it will not have any impact,” the deputy minister said.

He specified that the southwestern part of the Dnipropetrovsk region, Mykolaiv, Odesa and Kherson regions suffered the most as a result of the drought.

“Due to the weather factor, crops were lost on an area of ​​about 386 thousand hectares in Ukraine. On 1.2 million hectares of crops, the yield decreased by 30-50%,” the deputy minister said.

Vysotsky noted that the loss of the Kakhovka reservoir and irrigation systems affected the decline in yields in these regions.

“Unfortunately, especially in the southern and southeastern regions, we saw an atypical drought this year, which led to a decrease or loss of harvest. It is obvious that if there had been irrigation in these regions, these losses could have been avoided. The harvest has not yet been harvested, but theoretically 3 to 4 million tons of grain and oilseeds could have been grown there,” Vysotsky said.

Tags: Ukraine, drought, crop forecast