Europe’s development bank has pumped nearly $1bn into chicken farms and other large Ukrainian food businesses since Russia’s full-scale invasion, funding cheap exports that have recently helped swell farmer protests across the EU. 

Since 2022, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has lent $890mn to Ukraine’s producers of eggs, poultry and sugar, which will soon face quotas to protect EU jobs, the bank told the Financial Times. 

In Poland, the largest EU chicken producer, farmers have spearheaded months-long protests against the EU’s decision to drop restrictions on Ukrainian imports. Polish agribusinesses are particularly concerned about European financing for MHP, Ukraine’s biggest poultry company, which received more than one-fifth of all the EBRD’s lending in the past two years.