PM Morawiecki: govt approved aid worth 10 bln zlotys for Polish farmers

"What the EU is offering us is offered with a delay, it is too little, a drop in the ocean of needs," Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference.

On Friday, the Polish government approved measures including increasing the amount of excise duty farmers can have refunded on diesel to 1.46 zlotys from 1.20 zlotys.

Morawiecki said the government would also ask the European Commission to give it permission to raise the amount that can be refunded to 2 zlotys. It will also pay subsidies to ensure farmers get a minimum price of 1,400 zlotys per ton of wheat.

Poland's Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Robert Telus informed the cost of aid for farmers would amount to approx. 10 billion zlotys (2.4 million dollars).

Morawiecki stressed this would be the largest aid for Polish agriculture in history.

The first trucks carrying Ukrainian food products including corn and eggs resumed transit via Poland to the Netherlands on Friday as rules allowing the shipments took effect overnight.

The rules brought an end to a ban that was introduced without notice on April 15 leaving many companies with goods stranded across the border in Ukraine.

A spokeswoman for the National Revenue Administration told TVN24 the first convoy consisted of five trucks and was escorted by two cars from Poland's customs authority.

Convoys will travel either to the Polish border or to ports to be loaded on to ships, customs officials said.

Central European countries are trying to thrash out a deal with Brussels on EU-wide measures to help agriculture after some of them unilaterally introduced import bans on Ukrainian food products.

Several central European countries became transit routes for Ukrainian grain that could not be exported through the country's Black Sea ports because of Russia's invasion in February 2022.

Bottlenecks then trapped millions of tons of grains in countries bordering Ukraine, forcing local farmers to compete with an influx of cheap Ukrainian imports.

The European Commission has offered 100 million euros of aid for central European farmers in addition to an earlier 56-million-euro package.

It has also said it will take emergency "preventive measures" for wheat, maize, sunflower seeds and rape seed, but the central European states want this list to be widened to include products including honey and some meats.