I’ve just spotted an interesting disinformation I suspect it targeted at European farmers, claiming that “huge multinational corporations” have just purchased 17 million hectares of arable land in #Ukraine - that has first appeared in 2024 but now was unfrozen and recycled, likely due to the wave of #Mercosur protests. The idea is simple - “if you can’t compete with Mercosur, Ukraine will be even worse”.
This 17m has drawn my attention because it’s easy to check. As it comes out, in the whole story the only true data is the number “17”.
Since 2024 Ukraine liberalised farming land purchases allowing large agricultural companies to buy and lease land, which was previously restricted.[^1] But it still must Ukrainian companies owned by citizens of Ukraine. And companies did… moderately.
Since 2024 there were in total 17’000 hectares of farming land purchased in the whole country. If you wonder how much that is, it’s a square 13x13 km. Because any farmer would laugh their eyes out on such “scare” (they know how much a hectare is), the authors of the fake had to modesty adjust it 1000x up.
More importantly, what is even more important is the land leases which accounted for 70’000 hectares in the whole country, including regions adjacent to the war zone, which boosted income of local communities impacted by the war. The liberalisation had none of the predicted negative impacts (“they will buy us all!”) and had all the positive impacts the farmers expected.
As an added bonus, #Monsanto does not exist since 2018, which should be the first red flag. This story had been already debunked by EUvsDisinfo in 2024[^2] but even they missed this bit :)
[^1]: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/37156
[^2]: https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/ukraines-fertile-lands-no-longer-belong-to-the-ukrainians/