Crisis in Ukrainian horse breeding caused by illegal lease of land of stud farms - association
KYIV. Sept 8 (Interfax-Ukraine) – The state enterprise Horse Breeding of Ukraine, subordinate to the Ministry of Economy, which includes a number of stud farms, has entered into agreements for the lease of part of the land of state enterprises with unidentified persons who grow and sell crops, as a result of which the farms incur losses, and horse breeding branches in the country are threatened with extinction.
This was announced by the president of the Association for Horse Racing, Tetiana Andriyshina, during a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine agency.
"The Horse Breeding of Ukraine state enterprise was actually artificially created as a corruption structure over state stud farms, which were deprived of all functions: they do not conduct independent economic activities, unknown persons enter them, with whom an agreement on joint cultivation of the land is concluded, as a result of which during 10 years the stud farms have gone bankrupt," she said.
According to her, state stud farms do not receive the crop they own, since it is exported by private individuals, with whom Horse Breeding of Ukraine allegedly concluded land lease agreements. Thus, the stud farms incur losses due to the inability to receive income from the sale of the harvest from the land belonging to them, as well as due to the need to pay land tax, utility bills, wages and other expenses in full.
Andriyshina noted that her organization and employees of the stud farms appealed to law enforcement agencies, the Office of the Prosecutor General and the president with a request to stop corruption in the state enterprise, but to no avail.
According to her, in connection with the situation at Horse Breeding of Ukraine, the employees of the stud farms are delayed in paying their wages, the enterprises do not carry out veterinary control of the condition of the animals, and besides, race horses cannot be tested at the Kyiv Hippodrome. In addition, the animals do not receive adequate nutrition.
"We appeal to the president: if you don't need a Ukrainian horse breed, if you don't need the Ukrainian-born Oryol trotters, let's hand them over for meat, stop mocking horses and people," the expert said.
She also clarified that the Association for Horse Racing had recently submitted a request to the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food for receiving a state budget subsidy at the rate of UAH 51,000/year for one fertilizing stallion and UAH 31,000/year for a mare, and is currently awaiting the results of its consideration.
During the press conference, the deputy director for research of the Institute of Animal Husbandry of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine, Iryna Tkachova, clarified that since the independence of Ukraine, the number of horses has decreased by 3.1 times, from 700,000 in 1991 to 226,000 this year, 95% of which are used for running a personal peasant farm.
As reported, the Ukrainian government in December 2010 reorganized state-owned horse breeding enterprises that were not subject to privatization into the state enterprise Horse Breeding of Ukraine. The state-owned enterprise permanently uses 54,100 hectares of agricultural land, of which 43,500 hectares of arable land.