May 20 2002, 16:00 UNIAN

Procedure for government grain loans are ready to go

UNIAN reported that AIC Minister Serhiy Ryzhouk declared the procedures for loan grain prices ready. As he put it, the key advantage of such procedure is "floating" price rather than a fixed price. "Under conditions of market based price formulation and weak export potential for grain we, once fixing the price, could willy nilly make such price an average price for domestic market thus decreasing the domestic price for grain", said Ryzhouk.

He also said that businesses that will buy grain from farmers on loan basis would get a 100% compensation of the discount rate for loan use if the latter were allocated for grain purchase. Ukrainian budget will provide US $18mn for the aforementioned purpose. The AIC Minister said that 60% of the above amount will come from budget channel aimed at compensating discount rates and another 40% will come from other budget sources.