Organic Agriculture venture set decades backward by Pinchuk’s Fund

The largest organic agricultural project in Ukraine, Maharishi Organic Agriculture has been set to unprecedented conversion to conventional chemical farming by the new owners, the ICON Private Equity fund, the investment vehicle of Viktor Pinchuk. Mr Pinchuk was the organizer and the sponsor in the spring of 2008 of a public concert in Kiev of Sir Paul McCartney who is known as a supporter of the organic movement.

Maharishi Organic Agriculture organic farming projects in Ukraine received a new boost of development in the summer of 2008, when Mr Pinchuk’s ICON Private Equity joined the largest organic food production project in Ukraine, and boasted the nation’s most scalable organic certification for 42,000 hectares out of its 50,000 hectares land in the south of Kherson region and north of Crimea. After less than two years, MOA is being set backwards in decades in terms of agronomic, technological, ecological and economic prospects….

The MOA’s efforts in 2008 included hiring a new team including the leading Ukrainian organic agronomist and a biodynamics expert Gennadiy Tyshchenko, a student of Alex Podolinsky, the world’s leading expert in biodynamics, and formerly, the chief agronomist of the oldest Ukrainian organic farm AgroEcologia in the Poltava region.

One of the largest organically certified farms worldwide, MOA International was committed to growing quality organic grains, fruits and vegetables through the application and development of modern sustainable technologies such as biodynamic farming, which generally promote the health and natural balance of the soil while creating ecologically safe jobs and producing healthy food for people around the world.

MOA Ukraine project was set to prove its new biological approach of massive land cultivation. However, the unprecedented conversion from organic to conventional farming by Mr Pinchuk’s fund has sent a very dubious message to the consumers in Ukraine and the international buyers of MOA’s organic produce.

While the European Union states have committed to gradually convert to organic agriculture despite the hardness of conversion periods, Mr Pinchuk’s fund has chosen a path in an irrationally opposite direction. European experts link such move to the Fund’s incompetence in organic farming. Hired by the Fund, MOA’s COO, Omry Karplus, an Israel national, had no background in organic farming before joining the project. As some agri experts who visited the MOA farm suggested, Mr Karplus seemed to have had no operational farming experience at all but has managed to persuade Fund’s management to turn Maharishi’s project into an intensively cultivated, conventional farm.

While the cost of conversion from conventional to organic agriculture in Europe is calculated in thousands of Euro’s per hectare, MOA has boasted until now the Continent’s largest consolidated 42,000 hectares landbank of organically managed fields certified according to the EU’s Organic Farming, American USDA and Japanese JAS organic standards — Europe’s largest capacity of industrial scale organic crops production.

Organic industry experts estimat that MOA’s potential loss due to the organic-to-conventional conversion may reach from 60 to over 80 million Euros. If not reimbursed to Mr Pinchuk’s fund by the the agrochemical corporations, this loss might become the World’s biggest failure in the entire history of organic agriculture and farming practice, not to mention the negative impact such conversion might have on the overall image of the Fund, regional economy and the ecological balance in the area due to many-multipes higher carbon emission, agrochemical pollution and general evaluation by the market.

While organic agriculture remains one of the most attractive areas to invest internationally, Ukraine is one of the few locations in the World where scalable organic production is most promising due to the concentration of most fertile soils, availability to inexpensive labor, existing infrastructure including some of the largest irrigation canals in the World and Ukraine’s immediate access to European and international markets through the Black Sea ports.

Agricultural land investment in Ukraine

Organic agriculture and farming in Ukraine