In Ukraine, bees are killed in great numbers. In this season, the exceptions are only two regions. One of the reasons is a lack of communication between beekeepers and agricultural producers. BRDO experts suggest to make a series of amendments to the beekeeping legislation and introduce a “principle of good neighbourliness”.
These amendments will help prevent bee deaths from poison used on agricultural lands, while the creation of effective mechanisms for collecting evidence will allow affected parties to obtain compensation for losses and protect their interests in the event of the death of bee colonies. The proposed legislative changes will also help simplify the rules for registering bee farms.
The BRDO Agriculture Sector Head Andriy Zablotskyi presented a Roadmap for beekeeping industry reform as part of Agro 2018 on June 7. According to him, non-transparent market rules cause administrative difficulties to open and run a business. SMEs should be in contact with government bodies 26 times to be registered and start functioning properly. At the same time, such regulatory burden does not protect honey producers from the negative impact of the use of plant protection agents by agricultural producers, which leads to mass bee deaths and threatens to destroy such a business.
“Such a number of regulatory tools do not provide businesses with a clear understanding of the rules of conduct in the market and provoke numerous corruption risks. In particular, this concerns the procedure for the use of veterinary and sanitary certificates of bee farms, which are the main documents to have access to the market. Another important step for the industry is the introduction of the insurance coverage for environmental risks by producers of plant protection agents to third parties and the insurance coverage for related activities by beekeepers,” Andriy Zablotskyi said. “Our roadmap proposes amendments to a number of legislative acts that will allow to have stable positive developments, promote the development of SMEs in the regions and establish new export records.”
As a reminder, Ukraine is among the three largest honey exporters in the world. In 2017, the export volumes amounted to 68 thousand tons.
