How the EU is killing farmers’ livelihoods with multi-million dollar aid to a Ukrainian chicken king

Ukrainian poultry giant MHP has benefited greatly from EU financial support to dominate the market as chicken farmers across Europe have suffered and launched protests. Campaigners and residents near MHP’s flagship farm in central Ukraine say the company is hurting the environment and their quality of life, but continues to secure major loans without any oversight of such impacts.

In the rolling hills of Ukraine’s central Vinnytsia region, a five-hour drive south of Kyiv, lies a poultry farm of almost unfathomable size.

Owned by Ukraine’s biggest chicken company MHP – formerly known as Myronivsky Hliboproduct – the Vinnytsia Poultry Farm consists of several heavily guarded, barbed-wire fenced breeding farms with dozens of white-painted barracks.

Those barracks are all filled with broiler chickens. More than eight million are slaughtered per week, according to the poultry giant.

Between the breeding barns, vast patches of sunflowers, corn and maize grow tall. MHP leases a total of 351,600 hectares of land − an area about one-and-a-half times the size of Luxembourg − from local farmers to grow chicken feed. Trucks carrying building materials, feed and chickens drive up and down the narrow county roads seven days a week, much to the frustration of local residents and farmers who say MHP’s operations are hurting the environment and damaging their homes.

Read the full article from Follow the Money here.