By 2015, Ukrainian agro holdings will concentrate more than 25% of the arable land in this country. To do this, they have a number of advantages - the ability to attract funding through IPOs and the use of credits at low interest rates, modern farm machinery and agricultural technology, high performance and favorable wholesale product prices.

Maksym Shynkarenko, capital markets manager with the investment group Altera Finance, expressed this opinion at the 5th International Investment Summit DIIS, which took place in Donetsk, according to APK-Inform.

"The trends of consolidation in Ukraine will only intensify. If in 2010 large Ukrainian agricultural holdings with a land bank of more than 10,000 hectares accounted for 12% of the market (4 million hectares), today big players hold 20% of the land (6.4 million hectares). The remaining land assets are distributed among small and medium-sized agricultural enterprises, farmers and the public," the expert said.

He also emphasized that in 2000, food prices in the world doubled, and under the most conservative estimates, by 2020 they will increase by another 25%. Therefore, the investment attractiveness of land and agricultural assets will increase and thus their cost will rise, too. At the same time, the share of investors from developing countries, especially from China, will also increase.

Ukrinform