Agrarian import ban and its impact on the Russian and European Union agrarian trade performance

The main objective of the paper is to identify the impact of the Russian agrarian import ban on imports of certain agricultural products from Europe, Norway, Canada, the USA and Australia. The import ban particularly affected the import of competitive agricultural and foodstuff commodities into Russia. The ban was the result of the political and security tensions existing between the Russian Federation and the Western World, since early 2014. If we take into consideration the volume of the mutual trade and the importance of the mutual trade for each of the stakeholders mentioned above, it can be assumed that the main objectives of the Russian embargo was not to hurt the individual countries - especially the European Union, but rather to support domestic producers in order to achieve a higher level of self-sufficiency in basic agricultural products. It is evident that the objective of the applied import ban is to reduce the dependence of the Russian Federation on imports. This paper provides an analysis of the most affected product groups and products, especially in relation to the EU countries. The paper provides the following findings: The result of the applied import ban was a significant reduction of the Russian agrarian import value. The import ban also improved the overall competitiveness of the Russian agricultural trade, whilst on the other hand, the competitiveness of some commodity groups was reduced.