Unscrupulous agricultural producers, amid a low harvest, are trying to disrupt the previously concluded forward contracts for the supply of grain, which could collapse the grain market of Ukraine and provoke disastrous results both for the agricultural sector and for the country’s economy as a whole already in the current marketing year, Ukrainian Grain Association (UGA) President Mykola Horbachev believes.
“Today, many unscrupulous producers, seeing an increase of market prices, want to refuse to fulfill the previously concluded contracts, in fact to make a default. And we are not talking about those agrarians who lost crops due to drought or other weather disasters, but those who had good harvest,” he explained in an exclusive commentary to the Interfax-Ukraine agency.
Because of this, Ukraine may lose a source of about $11-12 billion to finance the agricultural sector, he said.
Horbachev also said that companies that did not suffer from drought in some regions of the country are trying not to fulfill the previously signed contracts for the supply of grain, aiming to get excess profits at the expense of counterparties. Such unfair actions will inevitably lead to both economic and reputational losses for the entire economy of the country.
According to the UGA assessment, in the spring, the agrarians contracted about 6 million tonnes of maize of the current harvest on forward contracts at a price of $150-160 per tonne, thus receiving financing for the sowing campaign.
One of Ukrainian banks and the large Ukrainian agricultural holding Kernel signed a first non-deliverable forward (NDF) contract in the history of Ukraine last week, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) has said.
“This is the first transaction to hedge currency risks of this type in the Ukrainian market. Earlier, deliverable forward contracts were also concluded in the market, but their share is still insignificant and has great potential for growth,” the regulator said in a statement last week.
NBU Deputy Governor Oleh Churiy said that in the world on the foreign exchange market spot transactions, that is, those that are actually settled on the same day, make up no more than a third of the total foreign exchange market.
“The rest are transactions using hedging instruments: forwards, futures, swaps. Unfortunately, in Ukraine it is the opposite: spot transactions dominate, and cases of hedging currency risks by the business are still isolated,” Churiy said.
According to him, with a floating exchange rate, business owners and financial directors should pay attention to hedging tools that are already available in Ukraine. These are, in particular, deliverable and non-deliverable forward contracts, which can be concluded with banks for export-import operations or loans from nonresidents.
“For four years now, Ukraine has been living in a flexible exchange rate environment that avoids the accumulation of imbalances in the economy, but also requires prudent planning for the business,” the NBU deputy governor said.
