The International Finance Corporation (IFC) has said the international crop receipts could be launched in spring 2019, IFC Project Manager for Ukraine Crop Receipts Helen Fairlamb said at a roundtable in Kyiv on Wednesday.
The IFC has already conducted the first trainings for farmers and hopes to see the first deals in the spring, Fairlamb told Interfax-Ukraine.
As the IFC said, after the entry into force of the law on currency and foreign exchange transactions, farmers can raise funds on crop receipts from nonresident creditors. According to the international receipts mechanism developed by IFC, such transactions will include a financial crop receipt and a loan/forward contract or an import contract.
Crop receipts are particularly relevant in Ukraine, where the land moratorium still exists, and farmers do not have a quality guarantee to attract financing. In addition, crop receipts are registered in the online register, and the lender can see how many receipts the farmer has and performs, Regional Manager for Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine at IFC Jason Pellmar said.
He added that crop receipts help farmers create a credit history to further raise funds.
According to the IFC, under the crop receipts project, it is also planned to modernize the legislation to create a secondary market for crop receipts (securitization).
Member of the Board of OTP Bank Alla Biniashvili said that for banks providing financing on crop receipts, the difficulty is that the National Bank considers these loans as unsecured.
The total amount of crop receipts in 2018 exceeded $200 million (UAH 5.24 billion). In total, 669 crop receipts were issued from 53 lenders for 1.1 million tonnes of agricultural products used as collateral.
From the beginning of 2019 as of February 12, 2019, a total of 104 receipts were issued to the amount of over UAH 1 billion.
One troy ounce=31.10 grams
The share of IT industry of the Ukrainian economy is 4% of GDP, First Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Economic Development and Trade Stepan Kubiv has said.
“Today, the IT sector is 4% of GDP, 150,000 employees with high wages, who form the middle class. In a year and a half they will already be 200,000,” he said at a government meeting on Wednesday.
Kubiv also said that the government intends to support investments in innovations in such areas as the agricultural and industrial complex, the IT industry, aircraft manufacturing, tourism, infrastructure and other sectors.
“Together with the National Bank, we must form the best prerequisites for creating financial projects that will create new high-paying jobs,” Kubiv said.
Turkish Airlines in 2018 serviced over 800,000 passengers of own flights to/from Ukraine, which is 28% more than in 2017.
General Manager of the airline Dincer Sayici said at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday that the number of transit passengers on international flights increased 25%. The total number of passengers traveling to/from Ukraine increased 14%.
The load factor for flights to and from Ukraine was 71%.
The most popular destinations are Istanbul, Phuket, Guangzhou, Antalya, Miami, Beijing, Maldives, New York and Barcelona.
“The freight traffic of the airline from Ukraine increased by 16% for exports, by 23% for imports compared with the figure for 2017,” Sayici said, without giving absolute figures.
According to him, Ukraine in 2018 took the seventh place in the number of tourists visiting Turkey, showing an increase of this flow by 10%.
In general, Turkish Airlines in 2018 increased the number of passengers carried by 10% compared with 2017, to 75.2 million people. The load factor rose by 1.1 percentage points, to 80.2%. For the year, the airline operated flights to 124 countries in 306 destinations.
Ukraine in 2018 exported grain for $7.2 billion, hitting the record, the press service of the Institute of Agrarian Economics national research center has reported.
According to the Institute of Agrarian Economics, grain exports in kind fell by 0.4% in 2018 compared with 2018, to 41.7 million tonnes, and the record revenue is linked to growth of grain prices.
The volume of wheat and barley exports in 2018 fell compared with 2017 to 16.4 million tonnes and 3.6 million tonnes respectively.
At the same time, according to the institute, in 2018, corn exports exceeded the figure for 2017 by 10%, amounting to 21.4 million tonnes. Export of rye also increased fourfold, but its volumes still remain insignificant – about 100,000 tonnes.
According to the Institute of Agrarian Economics, the countries of Asia, Europe and Africa remain the largest buyers of Ukrainian grain. Egypt is the leader with a share of 9.2%, but in 2018 it reduced purchases of Ukrainian grain to $666 million (a fall of 20%).
Spain ranked second for the second year in a row (8.9%), which in 2018 increased the volume of grain purchases to $643 million (a rise of 35%). The top buyers of Ukrainian grain are the following: the Netherlands ($556 million), China ($552 million), Indonesia ($487 million), Saudi Arabia ($449 million), Italy ($336 million), Philippines ($316 million), Tunisia ($290 million), Morocco ($263 million), and Libya ($248 million). In total, these 11 countries formed two thirds of the value of all purchases of grain products, the Institute of Agrarian Economics reported.
