OSW Report | The breadbasket of the world? Agricultural development in Ukraine

The second reason for choosing this over any other framework is Russia’s military aggression, which led to the annexation of Crimea and Kyiv’s loss of control over part of the territories in the Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, making it difficult to compare the per- formance of the agricultural sector in the pre-2015 period. [...] The leading position of Andriy Verevskyi (owner of the agri- holding Kernel) on the vegetable oil market is undisputed, but still the majority of agricultural companies are in the hands of medium and small players who own more than 80% of the cultivated land. [...] The vast majority (90%) of the country’s area belongs to the basins of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. [...] As recently as May 2021, in a survey by the Rating centre, only 36% of Ukrainians were in favour of introducing free trade in agricultural land.7 This was mainly due to the fear of a repeat of the situation in the 1990s regarding the privatisation of state assets, when the most profitable enter- prises and factories were taken over for a small fraction of their market value by a group of oligarchs. [...] 5. Agri-holdings – a special case 5.1. Characteristics of agri-holdings After the adoption of the Land Code in 2001, the process of the concentration of the agricultural economy began through the creation of so-called agri -holdings, namely the companies farming on tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of hectares of leased land.