About daily bread for the army
26 January 2024 14:34
Yuriy Havrylechko, PhD in Public Administration
There are not very pleasant signals coming from the Armed Forces that there are many questions about food in the army. We are talking about the quality of food. So far, it hasn’t come to the point where defenders are posting the food supplied to the military on social media. There is still hope that these are isolated annoying misunderstandings.
But these unfortunate misunderstandings force us to look at the Ministry of Defence’s tenders on Prozorro. There are some very interesting observations. Spoiler: The MoD requires suppliers to buy food at prices that have long since ceased to exist on the market. What kind of food quality can we talk about then?
For a comparative analysis, we can extract the prices from the tender of the Ministry of Defence of 4 January And then compare them with the prices of products in the daily monitoring of the Ministry of Finance portal And analyse the wonderful article with real food prices in the official parliamentary publication Golos Ukrainy Some of the items look like this (the list can be continued if you wish):
Potatoes: MoD contract – 6 UAH/kg, Golos Ukrainy – 12-20 UAH/kg, Ministry of Finance – 24.40 UAH/kg
White cabbage: MoD contract – 12.6 UAH/kg, Voice of Ukraine – 15 UAH/kg, Ministry of Finance – 15.34 UAH/kg
Pasta: contract of the Ministry of Defence – 25.50 UAH/kg, Voice of Ukraine – 27-28 UAH/kg, Ministry of Finance – 28 UAH/kg
Eggs (oh, those eggs!): MoD contract – 4.8-4.92 UAH/unit, Voice of Ukraine – 9 UAH/unit, Ministry of Finance – 6.3 UAH/unit
Pork: MoD contract – 82.5-218 UAH/kg, Voice of Ukraine – 200-250 UAH/kg, Ministry of Finance – 166.47-231.42 UAH/kg
Beef: MoD contract – 87-174 UAH/kg, Holos Ukrainy – 400 UAH/kg (wow!), Ministry of Finance – 261.7 UAH/kg.
At this point, questions begin to arise. The Ministry of Defence prescribes prices in its catering contracts that were relevant at best last year or the year before. According to the State Statistics Service, for example, meat alone went up by almost 13% last year.
In another recent tender on Prozorro, an interesting point can be noticed: one of the suppliers officially appealed to the MoD to increase the maximum prices for food and bring them closer to the real ones. However, the MoD did not appreciate the idea and wrote that the ceiling prices “remain unchanged”.
If the prices in the MoD contracts remain unchanged, then guess what the changes will be? That’s right, the quality of the food that will end up on the table of a Ukrainian defender. Only the State Statistics Service can afford to boast of consumer inflation of 5% over the past year, the reality is quite different…
My subjective conclusion is this: The Ministry of Defence was so frightened by the scandal with the 17 eggs that it is now afraid to raise prices in tenders, even if real food prices are rising. It’s a harmful position that could lead to even bigger scandals. Imagine if more and more soldiers or their relatives post photos and videos of poor quality food for the defenders on social media..
P.S. The photo of the sausage is for illustrative purposes only. The screen from the Prozorro website is real.
Source: Facebook.
