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The EU budget: Unlocking a new vision for Europe

This article first appeared on Euractiv.com.

The first glimpses provided by the European Commission on 1 March of a New Vision for Europe were not only defeatist but could not have felt more alienating for the citizens of Europe.

The release of the white paper from Commission President Juncker was supposed to be the first political moment to stir a new flame, a moment for grand vision and to plant the first seeds for how to reconnect Europe with its citizens.

Instead, the five scenarios – of which most had titles like ‘do nothing new,’ ‘do less,’ or ‘only the free market’ – spoke predominantly of the consequences of different structural arrangements, the dominance of market forces, and varying degrees of federalism for the European Project.

It mentioned scarcely anything about citizens and nothing at all about the environment. In sum, the New Vision failed to offer any solutions to the root causes of the disintegration forces chiselling away at the Union, or address the primary concerns of Europe’s citizens.

Fortunately the process for developing the New Vision is not over, and what few people have noticed is that a magic key remains untouched in this debate. Should we choose to use it, a key to unlock a more inspiring and politically winnable New Vision for a strong Europe may well be the next European budget.

The proposal for the upcoming seven-year ‘Multiannual Financial Framework’, or the EU budget, will be developed this year, and could give the much needed form and substance to a more forward looking vision. It is not too late.

But in order to see how to use the Budget as key to galvanise the New Vision into something meaningful that legitimately reconnects with Europe’s people, President Juncker will need something else: imagination.

While the EU Budget is only a fraction of the size of combined member state budgets, its real and symbolic role make it one of the key policies defining the European project. The reality is that many Europeans have little idea where the money goes, apart from being familiar with one or two star programmes like Erasmus for university students.

It is precisely by proposing an innovative, restructured budget, that the Commission can find a politically legitimate path and give form and substance to the beginnings of a truly forward looking vision for Europe.

The next EU budget must be for the people. Imagine a Europe that looks after low-income households by providing grants or zero interest rate loans for energy savings investments. And an EU budget that reduces inequality, and addresses the 50 million Europeans living in energy poverty – and others the ‘growth and competitiveness’ story left behind.

Imagine a Europe where one stop shops exist providing households and communities with easy access to EU supported funding programmes for things like community power.

Imagine an EU that no longer allows finance to be misused to support fossil fuel infrastructure that damages people’s health, jeopardises the EU’s long term energy policy goals, and forces potentially catastrophic climate change, but instead is directed to the decentralised infrastructure needed to catalyse the clean energy transformation.

A budget that gives citizens a greater sense of ownership in the European Project, by establishing meaningful participation in spending for environmentally and socially sustainable development. Then imagine that EU labelling requirements were actually enforced (too often they are not) so that every project and every one of these households benefiting from EU funds displayed the EU flag.

Finally imagine that Europe sets a fundamentally new orientation for society by agreeing more enlightened economic indicators to measure progress. A commitment to measuring and pursuing progress at European level based on well-being, and socially and environmentally sustainable prosperity, instead of the soulless and distorting dominance given to GDP per capita, has never been more needed.

At this point, some will caution that Brexit means Europe is likely to be faced with a smaller budget, and that there are many who would feel that the EU was overstepping its role, risking national governments brandishing that old sword of State sovereignty if the above reforms were proposed in an ambitious way.

Part of the answer to this may be increasing the amount of the EU’s ‘own resources’ within the Budget – the ability of the EU to raise and direct revenue at the European level, which could come in a number of forms, including green taxation to steer investment in the right direction.

Instead, the current budget is overly reliant on Member State contributions from gross national income. The share of truly genuine ‘own resources,’ funding streams under the EU’s direct control, decreased from over 65% in 1976 to merely 12.9% in 2016, and the connection with increasing questioning of the added value of the EU is no coincidence.

If combined with reforms to the transparency and democratic accountability of the spending of the EU budget, increasing Own Resources could create more direct links between citizens and Europe.

All of these ideas represent the sort of deep re-think that could allow the new EU to use the next budget to demonstrate a more visible added-value in ways that have the potential to renew hope in the future, yield political wins on the national front, and potentially help circumvent what is always a difficult fight over the carving of the seven year EU pie.

But I may have been wrong about one of these points – to know how to use the key, it is not only imagination that is needed, but courage.

Hatching discontent in Ukraine

This article first appeared on openDemocracy. (Image: Cherkasy oblast, by Niels Ackerman, Lundi13/NECU, 2016.)

The trip south from Kyiv to the villages of Cherkasy oblast takes several hours by bus over often bumpy roads, but I don’t mind — the idyllic countryside and expansive views of chernozem, the black soil that Ukraine is famous for, provides some respite from the concrete and hustle of the capital. Indeed, the country’s 30 million hectares of fertile and high-yielding soil is the reason why Ukraine is known as “the breadbasket of Europe”, and right now agriculture is booming.

The Maidan protests of 2014 ushered in an era of government reforms that have been a boon to agriculture, marked by a free trade agreement with the EU and a loan of $17 billion from the International Monetary Fund to support further reforms. The agricultural sector’s resilience is evidenced by the fact that, while most of the economy reeled after the Russian invasion of the Donbas region, this was the only sector to record growth in 2014. The World Bank has suggested that Ukraine offers a “big chance” to push for further deregulation and open up the country’s land resources to the agribusiness industry.

At present, a dozen or so large agribusiness holdings own a fifth of the country’s most fertile land. While a moratorium on land sales is in place to prevent further consolidation of agricultural ownership, pressure from corporations and international investors is likely to mean that the ban will be lifted.

This is why I travel so frequently to Cherkasy. People here have long made a living as smallholding farmers, but the intensification of large-scale agribusiness is threatening their very way of life.

Help from abroad

One threat to Cherkasy oblast is the industrial poultry farms of Yuriy Kosiuk, the billionaire chief executive of Myronivsky Hliboproduct (MHP). MHP, the country’s largest agricultural conglomerate, enjoys more than a 50% share of Ukraine’s domestic market for poultry, and is the leading exporter of Ukrainian poultry products.

MHP has received more than half a billion euros worth of development investments for its expansion from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and the European Investment Bank. This means that the company must adhere to the international standards established in within those respective bank policies. But instead the poultry producers association, together with other associations of agricultural producers, successfully lobbied president Petro Poroshenko to veto the new law on Environmental Impact Assessment, which had to be adopted by Ukraine in 2016 as part of conditions to the Association Agreement with the EU.

The company enjoys generous state subsidies and conditions, too. MHP has been among the VAT refund big beneficiaries until 2017, though due to conditions imposed by the IMF, the scheme switched to direct state subsidies. MHP will qualify for around one billion UAH (around $38m) out of four billion UAH for all agricultural producers. These conditions and privileges contradict Ukraine’s and the Cherkasy region’s agriculture and rural policies and development plans — where the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises is a claimed priority.

The support from international financiers and the state budget enables MHP’s aggressive plans for expansion throughout Ukraine. The plans for new poultry production facilities in Cherkasy oblast bring me here to support locals — they are fighting for their rights to a safe and clean environment, and a lifestyle based on small household farming. People have appealed to the company, to local and national authorities, to the President Poroshenko, but instead of dialogue and consultations they were faced with neglect, intimidation and retaliation.

MHP and Chyhyryn

The most recent conflict between MHP and residents of Cherkasy oblast came in February 2017 when 70 representatives from the historic town of Chyhyryn made the trip to Kyiv in order to protest against the planned expansion of poultry facilities in their town.  One of the protestors was Nina Martynovska, a deputy village council in Chyhyryn rayon, who joined because she believes that their concerns are falling on deaf ears: “We’ve complained to decision-makers at all levels of the government, including the president of Ukraine, so many times that we’ve lost count.”

The relationship between MHP’s subsidiary Peremoha Nova and the community in Chyhyryn, however, has not always been so confrontational. When the company first arrived in Chyhyryn in 2015, local attitudes towards MHP were neutral. The project MHP proposed for Chyhyryn focused on expanding its parent poultry flock facilities, including brigades for 100,000 adult chickens, three brigades for 110,000 young repair chickens, and one brigade for roosters. The project would bring about one million chickens in total to the area.

A green field and a factory in the mid-distance.
Credit: Niels Ackerman, Lundi13/NECU, 2016.

But due, in part, to the way in which the project was first communicated to the community, Chyhyryn residents grew weary of MHP. The company initially received tacit co-operation from the village council chairwoman to negotiate individually with landowners without community level consultations. The company secured lease contracts for a period of 49 years — essentially to circumvent the federal moratorium on any further land sales — to receive the land necessary for its expansion. The lease period and the payments made up front to the landowners essentially amounted to selling local lands to MHP, thus dividing the community between people who cashed in through the settlements and people in favour of remaining in control of their livelihoods.

The public meetings and discussions about the expansion that MHP was obliged to organised were plagued with controversy. Attempts to prevent community members from freely participating and the physical attacks on others who tried to enter consultations happened in several locations.

When the company released a preliminary environmental assessment for consultation in late 2016, there was substantiated feedback from the community not to continue with the project. For its part, MHP seemed to have little interest in what residents had to say — it didn’t bother to collect the feedback left at the administration offices for more than a month afterwards.

The failure of MHP to engage communities in meaningful consultations has been a concern to its international financiers. In May 2016, the EBRD published a monitoring assessment summary report that concluded that “additional effort needs to be made with regards to appropriate information disclosure, transparency of information and also ensuring grievances are responded to and managed appropriately, including any grievances which are not formally submitted using the company’s Grievance Form”. At that time, the bank made recommendations for improvement of MHP’s performance with regards to transparent and meaningful stakeholder engagement and consultation. A year later, real progress is hard to detect, so this time around the IFC has hired consultants to help the company deal with stakeholder engagement.

In spite of the lack of feedback on the environmental assessment, the MHP expansion plans pose a number of problems for the residents of Chyhyryn. A sanitary protection zone has not been established in accordance with Ukrainian law, meaning that people could still be located within areas exposed to excessive levels of pollution from poultry facilities. Nor does the assessment make clear the potential impacts on potable water in Chyhyryn. The amounts of wastewater that will need purification and treatment is another area which the assessment fails to cover. In addition, there is still a lack of clarity about how emissions from the brigades will be attended to, so air pollution should cause concern for locals.

As of today, local farmers rented the lands on which MHP (Peremoha Nova) relies on. There is a threat that the arrival of a big player with long-term contracts of 49 years for land leases will have a negative impact on competition between businesses and will lead to economic displacement of small farmers from these lands.

A cautionary tale

While the future of MHP’s expansion in Chyhyryn remains in limbo, another community in Cherkasy oblast provides a cautionary tale. Before MHP pursued its plans in Chyhyryn, the company had tried for several years to expand its operations in the village of Moshny, 100km northwest of Chyhyryn. But residents there put up a fierce resistance and are now in frequent contact with those in Chyhyryn to support their struggles.

In November 2014, the managing director of Peremoga Nova, a subsidiary of MHP, informed the Moshny village council that it planned to build 144 poultry rearing houses at the edge of the village.

What happened next in Moshny has echoes with the situation in Chyhyryn. While the managing director of MHP assured villagers that the expansion project would not proceed without broad community support, the company began making secret deals with residents to lease their lands so that construction could move ahead. Ultimately, this approach was unsuccessful and over the next few months, instances of harassment, threats and pressures to lease lands continued. Concerns about the environmental impacts also share a number of similarities to the Chyhyryn project, including issues related to the protection of drinking water and the assurance of a sanitary zone around the facilities.

A woman standing in a garden in the middle of rich greenery. her arms are crossed, her face shows a little smile.
Kateryna Oprieenko. Find out more about how Kateryna is countering the alliance between investment banks and agricultural businesses here. (Credit: Niels Ackerman, Lundi13/NECU, 2016.)

One of the leading figures of resistance in Moshny is Kateryna Onopriienko, who has been a frequent traveller to Chyhyryn and supporter of their movement. She has been a frequent target of harassment and intimidation. As a former member of the local rayon council, Onopriienko suffered attacks on her integrity — for instance, when leaflets were distributed designed to discredit her in the eyes of the community.

Stronger together

If there is a silver lining in MHP’s push into Cherkasy, it is the possibility for interaction between communities like Chyhyryh and Moshny and the promise it holds for strengthening their struggles through solidarity. To be an activist like Kateryna Onopriienko, you don’t just need to be brave. You need to understand the specific dynamics of rural living and the pressures you’re likely to face, including physical assaults and beatings. What this means is that people involved in the resistance to MHP provide support in a variety of ways to their counterparts.

Activists in Chyhyryn and Moshny regularly communicate by phone, attend joint protest rallies at state administration buildings or local councils and share knowledge about the most effective methods of appealing their case to decision-makers and MHP officials alike. Through continued support via trainings and campaign tactics, the villagers have been empowered to continue their fight against Ukraine’s largest agricultural conglomerate.

But people in Cherkasy aren’t only engaged in resistance, they are also looking for alternatives. Tourism can play a key role in the the development of these rural areas, so that people learn to value their lands as an asset to build on in the long term. This would also help defeat some of the short-termism offered by the mirage of employment at the industrial poultry facilities (where the process automatisation reaches 85%) or the quick cashout of a one-time payment for land.

I will continue to visit and support the communities in Cherkasy. In the future, I hope these visits will be for the development of their own, self-determined initiatives.

Tackling gender inequality at the EU’s flagship energy project

It is fitting that we use today to reflect on the European Investment Bank’s new Strategy on Gender Equality and Women’s Economic Empowerment: 8 March is International Women’s Day. Adopted at the beginning of this year, the strategy complements the bank’s existing social policy and reflects the equality principle of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The document sets three objectives for the bank: “to ensure that gender specific impacts are considered and addressed across the bank’s activities, to ensure equal access to the assets, services, benefits and opportunities generated by EIB Group investments and to increase women’s participation, on equal terms, in the economy and labour market.”

A good place to start with applying the new gender strategy is the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which the EIB is currently appraising to the tune of EUR 2 billion. The construction of this gas pipeline through Greece, Albania and Italy has already led to a number of social and environmental impacts. Depriving women a fair compensation for the loss of their livelihood in Albania is another serious risk that should be subject to due diligence.

In Albania, TAP runs through rural areas and has caused temporary and permanent disturbances to the farming that serves as the main source of income for many of the families. Although TAP has paid compensation for the loss of land and assets, neither TAP’s social and human rights assessments nor its compensation management plans acknowledge the broader problem of gender inequalities in access to property registration.

According to customary law (Kanuni), women have no right to inherit property of any kind. They cannot inherit it from their parents, but should take part of their husband´s family property. Women are also not able to control the property and so must rely on their husbands’ will. This situation often worsens in cases where a husband leaves the country for work, dies or divorces his spouse.

During the privatisation that followed the end of communist rule in Albania, land and other properties were redistributed to families and registered with the head of the family. Traditionally, the head of the family was its oldest man, who was sometimes not even a spouse but a father-in-law. In this way, women were effectively eliminated from owning property and subsequently running a business or participating in local decision-making.

Since then Albania has adopted several laws to address these inequalities. Civil servants are now obliged to register a property’s co-owner, including spouses. While the situation is improving, barriers to these inequalities are strong and difficult to tackle: a lack of awareness among local authorities and women especially in the countryside and the strong roots of tradition are just two such impediments. More broadly, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation found that still land tends to be registered in the name of men and estimated that women account for only 6.47 per cent of total farm managers in Albania.

That TAP has not noticed this problem is alarming, as it shows an ignorance of the challenges to land compensation, because it has not adopted any measures to ensure equal access by men and women alike to compensation. This oversight may not go unnoticed by the public financiers. The EIB’s new gender strategy is intended to tackle exactly these types of situations, so hopefully the bank undertakes a thorough due diligence of the gendered impacts of this project and develops a corrective action plan if the equality principle has been breached.

[Campaign update] Ukrainian nuclear power consultations could be Potemkin villages

On Sunday, March 5, nuclear reactor number 3 at the Zaporizhia power plant in Ukraine, Europe’s largest nuclear power station, will reach the end of its 30 year lifespan. Kiev wants to keep this Soviet-era nuclear unit going for at least ten more years, just like six other nuclear units which have already been granted lifetime extensions. But, for the first time and following a lot of international pressure, the Ukrainian government is planning to ask its neighbours whether they are OK with this. Or at least that’s what it says.

In December, the inter-service governmental coordination group on the implementation of the Espoo Convention in Ukraine
decided to start a series of transboundary consultations as part of the environmental impact assessments (EIAs) for the South Ukraine and Zaporizhia nuclear power plants as well as for the Rivne 1 and Rivne 2 reactors.

This decision is a major development, as Bankwatch and its member groups in Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary have long been calling on the Ukrainian government to condition the re-licensing of nuclear units on transboundary EIAs, as mandated by the Espoo Convention.

So far, the Ukrainian government has even ignored such requests from its neighbours and conducted only partial EIAs for the power plants with no consultations, thus disregarding the decision and recommendations of the Espoo Convention Implementation Committee (ECIC), issued in 2014. These violations have also led the ECIC to open new cases on five Ukrainian reactors. Now, the announced consultations should cover the three power plants power plants, where six reactors already operate beyond their original expiry date after their licences had been renewed.

Even though plans to start the transboundary consultations were set for January 2017, there are serious doubts that the results of the transboundary consultations will have any impact on the decision-making on lifetime extensions. Ukraine’s current nuclear regulations do not contain any such provisions, and given that the planned EIAs will be conducted for the power plants as a whole (South Ukraine 1 and Zaporizhia), rather than for individual units, there is a risk that the assessments and the transboundary consultations will not be bound to existing and upcoming lifetime extension decisions. Lifetime extension decisions are taken for individual reactors while the EIAs and the planned consultations are intended for entire power plants and therefore, the upcoming consultations might be incomplete and disconnected from the lifetime extension decision-making.

In addition, neither current Ukrainian legislation on EIAs, nor draft amendments that have been circulated in past few years, consider nuclear lifetime extensions an activity that requires transboundary EIA.

As part of Ukraine’s EU Association Agreement, as well as membership in the Energy Community, Ukraine should have already aligned its EIA legislation with the relevant EU directive, but it appears that Kiev is in no rush. As a result, in January the Energy Community Secretariat announced it is opening an infringement procedure against Ukraine over the country’s failure to introduce the relevant transboundary EIA provisions.

The Ukrainian government is currently working on a new energy strategy and the publicly available draft shows a continued focus on the prolongation of nuclear units’ operations for 20 years beyond their projected lifetime. In light of its plans to continue with lifetime extensions, it is imperative that the consultations the government is planning in neighboring countries assess the feasibility of lifetime extension for each unit separately and that their conclusions are binding for the decisions on lifetime extensions. Even though for 6 of the 11 reactors licenses have already been renewed, some important safety upgrade measures in these reactors are yet to be completed, and the consultations are an opportunity for Ukraine’s neighbors to raise the issue. Not least, neighboring countries, including Austria, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, are ought to be vigilant when invited for consultations and explicitly request that their outcomes have an impact on future lifetime extension decisions.

Updated: March 7, 2016, 12:40 CET

Small is (not always) beautiful: small hydro development in the Western Balkans

This blog first appeared on Balkan Green Energy News

It has long been recognised that the human and environmental costs of large dams are extremely high — just recently recent failure of the overflow channels at the Oroville dam, California, almost triggered a tragedy. Across the Balkans, however, instead of coming up with genuinely new ideas, doing the same but on a smaller scale is being repackaged as something innovative and sustainable. Small is beautiful, after all. And given the looming climate crisis, it must be a win-win: producing renewable electricity from small hydropower plants (SHPPs) goes hand in hand with saving the environment at the same time, so the logic goes.

Four myths about small hydropower plants

Proponents of small hydropower plants put forward four recurring arguments: that they cut CO2 emissions; ensure electricity supply; secure jobs and stimulate investment.

It is true that small hydropower plants have minimal impacts on climate. However they are often built in areas of high biodiversity value. A study by Austrian NGO Riverwatch showed that 817 or 49% of all projected hydropower plants in the wider Balkan region, most of them small, fall in protected areas. Research from Norway and China indicates that damage per MW is similar to those of bigger dams. The small output means that carbon savings are minimal. For instance just three wind turbines with a capacity of 2.2 MW (about the European average) would be sufficient to surpass the planned output of the 4.9 MW Medna Sana hydropower plant in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Most of the Western Balkans have yet to see whether the planned small hydropower plants produce as much electricity as expected. Albania has gone furthest in terms of construction: In early 2015, according to its National Renewable Energy Action Plan (NREAP), it had around 90 operational SHPPs compared to 18 in early 2006. Their total installed capacity was 294.32 MW and in 2014 they produced 919 GWh out of total electricity generation of 7793 GWh – just over 10 percent.

This appears to be a reasonable contribution to the energy supply, but it comes at a high environmental cost: Making serious changes to watercourses at 90 sites is not something to be undertaken lightly, especially in a climate change-vulnerable country. And this is far from the end: According to the NREAP in the first nine months of 2015, the Albanian Government awarded 110 more concessions for hydropower plants of various sizes.

Promises of economic prosperity are unfortunately ill-founded. Project promoters promise jobs, but due to automation this means just a few engineers, unlikely to be hired locally. Even some proponents of small hydropower acknowledge this: the EBRD in its Environmental and Social Guidance Note for Hydropower Projects says that “Hydropower projects typically…require a very limited number of staff for their operation.”

Finally, although small hydropower indeed attracts investments (the international development banks alone approved at least 819 million EUR worth of loans for hydropower in the wider Balkans between 2005-2015), it is questionable who benefits. In Montenegro, a company called Hidroenergija Montenegro d.o.o has won concessions for no less than 15 projects, either on its own or in a consortium, and is represented by controversial businessman Oleg Obradović, who is known to be close to the ruling party. Two projects, Slatina and Vrelo, are carried out by BB Energy, owned by Blažo Đukanović, the former Prime Minister’s son.

Is there such a thing as sustainable hydropower?

Very small hydropower may be a good solution for remote areas that are not able to get access to the grid or when the alternatives (e.g. kerosene lamps) are indeed more dangerous. For instance, the UK organisation Practical Action has implemented the Tungu-Kabiri Micro Hydro Power Scheme in rural Kenya. The scheme, built by local community, generates 18 kW that will cover a radius of 3 km. The power generated is owned by the local community.

But this is far removed from the realities in the Balkans. Unlike the Kenyan project, concessions in the Balkans are mostly awarded to private investors. Communities often oppose rather than supporting such schemes and are seldom involved in the decision-making, building or operation. And in most cases there is no real reason why the answer has to be hydropower — the region has largely untapped potential for wind and solar energy.

Alternatives: wind and solar

Looking at the National Renewable Energy Action Plans of the Western Balkan countries, hydropower predominates. For example, if the Bosnia-Herzegovina plan is implemented, in 2020, BIH’s renewable electricity generation would be 89.37 percent hydropower, 9 percent wind, 1.36 percent biomass and 0.27 percent solar. Albania has until recently prioritised small hydropower to such an extent that no feed-in tariffs were provided for other forms of renewable energy. However with a new law recently approved, this situation may finally change. Other Balkan countries have also prioritised hydropower above other renewables to a greater or lesser extent.


Source: National Renewable Energy Action Plans, Energy Community

At the same time, Serbia only has two wind farms in operation – Kula (9.9 MW) and Zagajica (La Piccolina) (6.6 MW); Macedonia has one — Bogdanci 1 (36.8 MW) and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Albania have none, although the 72 MW Krnovo plant in Montenegro should be starting operation this year. Kosovo’s AEC Kosova-Golesh (1.35 MW) wasn’t operating for years due to a dispute over feed in tariffs. Solar electricity generation is even scarcer than wind.

There is significant investor interest in tapping the region’s wind potential, but they face regulatory hurdles. Governments have capped the amount of wind power capacity that can be connected to the grid and receive feed-in tariffs at 500 MW until 2020 in Serbia and 350 MW until 2019 in BiH – thus delaying numerous projects.

Poorly-sited hydropower projects across the Balkans are facing growing resistance. If the destruction of rivers for hydropower continues, the backlash is likely to set back all forms of renewable energy. This is the last thing the region needs as it finally gets its decarbonisation process underway. It is therefore imperative on all of us to act promptly and put the transformation back on track.

[Campaign update] Protestors take to Kyiv to demand action from agribusiness giant encroaching on their lands

On 22 February, more than 70 activists and residents from the Chyhyryn region south of Kyiv protested outside the headquarters of Myronivsky Hliboproduct (MHP), the Ukrainian agribusiness conglomerate owned by one of the country’s richest billionaires. The protesters were airing their grievances against MHP’s plans to greatly expand its poultry operations in Chyhyryn, which locals believe will have a devastating effect on the small and medium sized farmers and the tourist potential of the area.

The expansion in question involves the construction of nine poultry brigades, which would provide rearing for more than a million chickens at a time. MHP is received financing for its operations from from a number of international financiers, including the European Investment Bank, the International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Nina Martynovska, the deputy village council of Ratseve, a village in Chyhyryn region, joined the protest because she believes that their concerns are falling on deaf ears. “We’ve complained to decision-makers at all levels of the government, including the president of Ukraine, so many times that we’ve lost count.” For her opposition to the project, Martynovska was beaten and hospitalised in June 2016. This is not the first instance of harassment related to resistance against agribusiness developments across the region.

Nina Martynovska during Wednesday's action
Nina Martynovska during Wednesday’s action

Discussion about the construction of the MHP’ facilities near Chyhyryn began in 2015, with several announcements and advertisements in local newspapers and a visit of company representatives to Ratseve. “We went to other parts of the region to see for ourselves the consequences of such developments: the stench, less water in wells, manure stored in the open and in our fields and woodland, and damage to our roads,” said Myhaylo Pohorishniy, a resident of Ratseve who was also at Wednesday’s march. In spite of the villagers’ ongoing complaints, MHP subsidiary Peremoha Nova published in November 2016 an official statement of intent to construct the rearing facilities within the boundaries of Ratseve.

MHP officials met with the protesters during the action, but the activists know the that fight for the survival of their community will continue.