OREANDA-NEWS. March 16, 2012. The commitments which have been undertaken by Ukraine when becoming to the WTO – are to harmonize all standards of production in the state. This was stressed by the First Deputy Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food Mykola Bezuglyi in the Government House.

Last year, for the development of such standards have been allocated 5 million UAH, this year the amount has doubled. According to Mykola Bezuglyi, next year – is the last when Ukraine must fulfill commitments to harmonize standards and technical specifications of Ukrainian products. "It is a huge amount of work need to do now and other than professionals working in agricultural education, starting this year we are going to engage public associations - professional and intersectoral – because they are most interested in the harmonization of standards and improving the conditions of export of manufactured products."

Mykola Bezuglyi noted that toward 99.99% food products have been exported by Ukraine there are no claims. And this is considering the fact that 30% of the importers – are the CIS countries, 25% - European Union countries, where quality requirements are extremely high.

Ukraine (under terms of the WTO) has to monitoring quality of livestock products in own territory. For this purpose currently there has been creating a regulatory framework to implement by the economic entities of the food safety management (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points). Currently, this system uses already many dairy and meat processing plants.

As it has been mentioned at a briefing, in the terms of the WTO, the competitive there can be only those enterprises that would be able balancing level of production costs and competitive price in the market.

The main document in the field of food production in Ukraine is the Law "On the Safety and Quality of Foodstuffs" and some more regulations. All of them, by the conclusions of international experts, are harmonized with the requirements of the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. Meanwhile, the head of veterinary and phytosanitary state service Ivan Bisyuk said that after a week to the Government sitting it would be submitted a revised Law on the safety and qualities of production.