Ukrainian agriculture is showing clear signs of recovery from its ‘transition crisis’. Signs of this include the emergence of land markets and the fact that production decisions are increasingly being made by private firms on a commercial basis subject to the usual rewards and sanctions that are provided by the market mechanism. As a result, agricultural productivity is increasing, albeit slowly and unevenly across farms, regions and types of production. At the same time, however, agriculture’s capital base in Ukraine continues to decline overall, despite the significant progress made by a subset of the country’s farms. Management skills and know-how continue to lag far behind the levels that will be necessary to tap Ukrainers great potential in agricultural productivity and to compete on world markets. As the initial policy responses to the very poor harvest in 2003 demonstrate, many reflexes and urges of central planning continue to lurk below a thin surface of market rhetoric in policy-making circles. This is the third book that the German Advisory Group has produced on agricultural policy in Ukraine, and the second that has been produced in conjunction with the Institute for Economic Reform and Policy Consulting (IER) in Kiev. This book, therefore, picks up on what has become a tradition of periodically taking stock of both developments in Ukrainian agriculture and the analysis of these developments that we have produced in recent years. It contains 15 chapters written by members of the IER, the German Advisory Group and selected external authors. In Part l we present a proposal for a policy strategy based on a coherent set of objectives, and study several broad sectoral topics such as the implications of WTO membership for Ukrainian agriculture, the mix of different agricultural policy tools employed in the country, the system of agricultural taxation and the links between agricultural productivity and poverty. In Part II we adopt a farm enterprise perspective, focussing on competition for land as well as farm efficiency, organisation and management. In Part III we con-centrate on policy in several specific markets such as grain and oilseeds, and on futures markets as a potential risk management tool for agriculture in Ukraine. While agriculture in Ukraine is too vast a topic to be covered comprehensively in any single volume, we hope that this selection of chapters and topics provides food for thought and conveys some of the excitement and interest that we have felt working in and on agriculture in Ukraine.weiterlesen