The beet cultivating and sugar producing branch is one of the few that activate normally in Moldova, but if we increase VAT on sugar from 8% to 20%, everything will be ruined, told the press Nicolae Moraru, president of the Sugar Beet Producers’ Association, as an explanation for the Association joining the peaceful protest initiated today by agricultural producers. The increase will lead to diminishing the branch’s efficiency, because we cannot compete with countries such as Ukraine, neither in subsidy, nor in the flow of Ukrainian goods on our market. They even resort to dumping, just to make sales, but Moldovan authorities cannot stop them, or don’t want to, but most likely lack the necessary capacity, he said. “In 2004, our branch was almost a goner, today we have 5 active factories, surfaces cultivated with beets increased from 10,000 to 30,000 hectares. This is an achievement, since the one hectare of beets requires about 16-18,000 lei, i.e. over €1,000”, he added. Moraru said that in the last two years beet cultivators have managed to sign insurances for their cultures, convincing insurance companies to accept them, since they are both profitable for insurance companies, and cultivators can get some of their expenses back in case of a drought. “Produces like this culture, they are satisfied, especially when they get about 45-50 tons of sweet roots per hectare. Many households have made great investments by buying expensive, high-performance combines; 8 such machines were bought only last year. Why do we want to destroy everything now? Maybe processors and exporters will not lose anything in the first phase, since they’ll be exporting. But in order to be able to export they’ll have to lower the sugar beet purchase price. If it is lower than last year, i.e. 600 lei per ton, it wouldn’t be profitable for producers to grow it anymore”, said Moraru. He says he doesn’t understand what the Ministry of Finance meant when it said that all producers must be treated equally. “I haven’t found any country where the VAT on sugar is higher than 10%, it is a special branch, both in Russia and in EU member states. In Hungary the standard VAT share is 24%, but it is smaller for farm goods; Romania also wants to decrease the VAT on agricultural products”, claims Nicolae Moraru. “If we increase the VAT on sugar, there not necessarily be a deficit of sugar, but we will ruin our farmers and then pay foreign farmers and import sugar”, concluded Moraru.