IMF and World Bank Help Push Through Contentious Ukraine Land Reform Amid Covid-19 Pandemic

In June, the IMF approved an 18-month, $5 billion loan programme with Ukraine. Facing acute public health and economic crises and an ongoing civil war, in the related memorandum the government committed to lifting the 19-year moratorium on the sale of state-owned agricultural lands, after sustained pressure from international finance institutions (see Observer Winter 2019). Olena Borodina with the Ukrainian Rural Development Network commented that, “the agribusiness interests and oligarchs will be the primary beneficiaries of such reform…[this] will only further marginalize smallholder farmers and risks severing them from their most valuable resource.”