Ukraine's draft national budget for 2018 announces the allocation of UAH 7.3 billion of state assistance to farmers compared to UAH 6.3 billion in 2017.

"We are injecting UAH 6.3 billion to the agricultural sector in 2017, and next year it will be UAH 7.3 billion," Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said at a government meeting on Friday.

Presenting the draft national budget Groysman said that growth of state assistance by UAH 1 billion is linked to the launch of the new program for supporting small farms. The association of farmers will monitor the distribution of funds.

The prime minister said that UAH 2 billion will be sent to support crop planting, including production of berries and UAH 1 billion will be sent to the program compensating 20% of cost of Ukrainian agricultural machinery for farmers.

The government proposed the new program for UAH 2.3 billion to support livestock breeding.

"We will compensate the interest rate from these UAH 2.3 billion for building new livestock farms. This would allow saturating the market with high quality meat, milk and increase livestock numbers and cutting prices of these products," the prime minister said.