On 15–16 September this year, the Lviv Agrarian Chamber celebrated its 25th anniversary. The celebrations took place in a working atmosphere – in the form of an international conference entitled ‘New Challenges and Opportunities for Cooperation in the Agrarian Sector in Times of War. 25 Years with the Lviv Agrarian Chamber’.
The event took place at Lviv National University of Natural Resources. Over 150 participants joined the event – farmers, authorised representatives of the Lviv Agrarian Chamber and the Agrarian Chambers of sixteen regions of Ukraine, representatives of the authorities and local self-government bodies, experts from international technical assistance projects and programmes, and leading academics from agricultural universities.
Delegations of representatives from the agricultural sector in Poland, Italy, France and the Czech Republic arrived to congratulate the Lviv Agrarian Chamber and share their own experiences and ideas.
Taras Vysotskyi, First Deputy Minister of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine, and Mykhailo Hladiy, Honorary President of the Agricultural Chamber of Ukraine and Vice-President of the Ukrainian Academy of Agrarian Sciences, addressed the conference participants with welcoming remarks.
The conference was attended by Yuriy Buchko, Deputy Head of the Lviv Regional State Administration; Yuriy Kholod, Acting Chairman of the Lviv Regional Council; Tetiana Hetman, Director of the Department of Agricultural Policy and Rural Development; Lyudmyla Honcharenko, Deputy Director of the Department of Agricultural Policy and Rural Development; and Oleg Sidorov, Director of the Department of Agricultural Policy and Rural Development of the Vinnytsia Regional State Administration. The event was divided into two panel discussions. During the first panel, Ihor Vuytsyk, Chairman of the Lviv Regional Chamber of Agriculture, spoke about the Chamber’s activities in the current wartime conditions; guests from the Republic of Poland and experts from international technical assistance programmes and projects also addressed the audience. They informed the audience about international experience in developing agricultural chambers and opportunities for the Lviv region, emphasised the conditions necessary for the development of agricultural producers, and outlined the terms of lending and subsidies, as well as the search for new avenues and opportunities for international cooperation in the agricultural sector.
In particular, presentations were given by Gustaw Jedrzejek, President of the Lublin Chamber of Agriculture; Richard Rozwadowski, lead expert of the EU project ‘Institutional and Policy Reform of Small-Scale Agriculture in Ukraine’ (IPRSA); Ivan Vyshnevsky, Deputy Head of the USAID ‘Agricultural Producer Lending (APL)’ Project in Ukraine.
The second panel focused on opportunities for rural development and the role of agricultural chambers in implementing land reform.
Tetyana Hetman, Director of the Department of Agricultural Policy and Rural Development, spoke about active support for the development of farming in rural areas. “In Lviv Oblast, the transformation of individual peasant holdings into family farms is continuing. While 43 new family farms were registered in 2022, 26 were registered in the first half of 2023. In terms of the number of family farms, Lviv Oblast is the leader among Ukraine’s regions. I would also like to emphasise that Lviv Oblast is the leader among Ukraine’s regions in allocating the largest financial resources from the local budget to support farmers. In particular, in 2023, almost 48 million was allocated from the regional budget to support the agri-industrial complex,” Tetyana Hetman emphasised in her speech.
During the discussion, participants were briefed on the new programme of the ‘Vidrodzhennia Sela’ agricultural cooperative, which operates in the Zolochiv district, as well as a new processing project being implemented in the Vinnytsia region. The conference participants were introduced to these initiatives by Daniel Klii, a key expert of the German-Ukrainian expert dialogue project on the sustainable development of fruit and vegetable growing in the field of initial and continuing education;
During the conference, over a dozen producers of craft products from the Lviv region, with whom the Chamber works, presented their products. Homemade cheese, natural fruit leather, fruit from their own orchards, juices, meat delicacies, sweets, honey, tea, bread – everyone could sample these treats, thereby learning more about local agricultural producers.
As part of the conference, the Lviv Agrarian Chamber, Lviv National University of Natural Resources and Environment, and nine communities in the Carpathian region of Lviv Oblast signed a Memorandum of Cooperation. Its aim is to define the relations, responsibilities and areas of cooperation between the partners to the Memorandum regarding the enhancement of legal awareness and the provision of information to citizens on the protection of biodiversity in the cross-border territories of Ukraine and Poland from the Sosnowski’s hogweed population ‘NoHeracletum UA&PL’.
At the conclusion of the plenary session, conference participants adopted an appeal to the President of Ukraine and the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine regarding the prevention of the expansion of the agricultural land market and the lifting of restrictions on the registration of ownership rights to land shares during wartime, as well as regarding the preservation of the status of farms as business entities.
To mark its 25th anniversary, the Lviv Agrarian Chamber commissioned a special commemorative coin. The reverse of the coin features Yevhen Khraplyvy, a Ukrainian public figure and the last president of the Agrarian Chamber. The obverse bears the emblem of the Lviv Agrarian Chamber: ‘25 Years Together’.
The coin was minted at the mint with the assistance of Mykola Cherep, who attended the conference alongside Valentyn Boiko, head of the Dmytrivska Territorial Community in Chernihiv Oblast. During the conference, authorised representatives of the LAP, partners and colleagues of the Chamber were honoured, who had worked together for many years on reforming the agricultural sector, supporting the agricultural business and the institutional development of the Lviv Agrarian Chamber.
On 16 September, the conference continued its work in an off-site format. Conference participants visited two agricultural enterprises — the private enterprise ‘Agrofirma Dzvony’ in the village of Bolotnia and the farming enterprise ‘Agrogen’ in the village of Zahiria, Lviv District — and also visited the Holy Dormition Univ Lavra of the Studite Order — one of the oldest monastic complexes in Ukraine.
