Ukrainian agriculture is under threat: without water, half of production could disappear
7.08.2025 - 11:21
The destruction of irrigation infrastructure poses a systemic threat to Ukraine’s food security.
The Ukrainian agricultural sector could lose up to 50% of its production due to a critical shortage of water, lack of irrigation, and climate change. This was stated by the deputy head of the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council (AUC), Mykhailo Sokolov.
According to him, the irrigation situation in Ukraine is catastrophic:
“The first thing to understand is that you cannot directly translate European experience into Ukrainian conditions. We don’t have a problem with over-irrigation—we irrigate too little. If you look at the statistics, in Soviet times we had 2.3 million hectares of irrigated land. Before the war, there were only 540,000. Now there are 134,000 hectares left. Compare this with 30–34 million hectares of cultivated land—and it is clear that we have almost no irrigation.”
Due to climate change, drought is already destroying crops in southern Ukraine. According to some forecasts, by 2050 it will be impossible to grow agricultural products on approximately 50% of Ukrainian areas, or 14 million hectares, without irrigation.
Meanwhile, farmers are independently implementing energy-saving technologies, without pressure from the state.
“There are ideas about introducing administrative regulation of crop rotation, following the example of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. But regulating crop rotation by the state is the worst that can happen. Ukrainian farmers use crop rotation because without it there will be no harvest. In arid regions, farmers themselves are implementing strip-till, no-till soil cultivation technologies to preserve moisture,” Sokolov noted.
He emphasized that without state participation in solving the problem, the road to nowhere. Due to climate change, Ukraine may lose half of its agricultural production. To prevent this from happening, a state policy is needed – to restore irrigation, accumulate water and distribute it by season.
The day before, USM wrote that a UAH billion were invested in the infrastructure of the Odesa region: focus on logistics to the port of Chornomorsk.
