Cultivating Ties: Ukraine Feeds China's Growing Appetite For Crops
The 16-month-long conflict with pro-Russian separatists in the east has not only cost more than 6,400 lives, but left much of the heavy industry there either shuttered or operating at less than full steam. Overall, the economy shrank nearly 7 percent last year and is projected to do even worse in 2015. The country’s currency, the hryvnya, has dropped more than 70 percent against the U.S. dollar since early 2014.
Despite that, Ukraine’s total crop production in 2014 reached 63 million tons, a post-Soviet record, and agricultural officials are hoping to come close to that this year.
The bumper crops should come as no surprise for a country once dubbed Europe’s “breadbasket” due to the bountiful harvests cultivated on fertile lands known as “black soil.” Ukraine has about 32 million hectares of arable land, about one-third as much as in the entire European Union.
Ukraine is also a piece of Beijing’s grander puzzle to develop a new trade route from China to Europe, according to Gale.
"China has a strategy to raise its profile in global economics and politics. Part of that is its new Silk Road or also known as ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy. And that involves strengthening economic relations with various countries between China and Europe, including Ukraine,” he said.
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Ukraine plans to launch the assembly of Chinese Hongdu L-15 light attack aircraft at an Odesa-based facility in 2016, a Ukrainian weekly has reported; discussions on the project are in their final stages. The manufacturing will be performed at Odesa’s Odesaviaremservis, a subdivision of the state’s Ukroboronprom defense complex (Delovaa Stolitsa, November 23). The L-15 is a licensed copy of the latest Russian combat trainer, the Yak-130.
It remains to be seen whether the China-Ukraine Hongdu light attack aircraft contract is the precursor of deeper Chinese-Ukrainian armaments relations. Nevertheless, this deal represents a first in that China is not only developing joint production of weaponry in the post-Soviet space, but it is explicitly dealing with a country in Russia’s self-proclaimed “sphere of privileged interest” with which Russia has poor relations. As a major supplier of energy to China, Russia has some cards to play if it starts to see China’s relationship with Ukraine as a threat. But utilizing those pressure points could come at a substantive economic cost to Russia at a time of record low global energy prices, combined with the European Union’s efforts to diversify away from Russian energy imports.
Accordingly, it seems likely that Russia will, for the moment at least, grudgingly tolerate the Hongdu contract while carefully monitoring any deepening development of Ukrainian-Chinese joint armaments production.
DYI
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