Whether farms have less than 120 ha of agricultural land registered in their name in non-conflict areas is easily verifiable.<sup>14</sup> Those that have more land registered may be eligible if they did not cultivate all their land in 2022. Although in the PSG program, area cultivated was based on farmers’ declaration, with random checks only, it can be easily verified by overlaying parcel boundaries from the public cadastral map with publicly available crop maps although technical challenges of quickly establishing real time interoperability between registries did not allow doing so in this case.<sup>15</sup> Appendix table A1 provides information on disbursement under the PSG land window for the universe of beneficiaries. The program paid a total of 35.1 US$ million in grants to 21,050 farmers. Of these, 73% had an area smaller than 20 ha, 15% were from 20 to 50 ha in size, and 12% had between 50 and 120 ha. As the grant was proportional to area, those in the three groups received 24%, 27% and 49% of total resources respectively. Of the farms receiving PSG support, 20% were organized as legal entity, 12% as sole proprietorship (FOP), and 68% as unincorporated individuals, receiving 50%, 22%, and 28% of resources, respectively. Table 1 displays the same figures for 19,660 beneficiary farms in the regression sample used for subsequent analysis.<sup>16</sup>

# **3. Farm-level effects of the war and PSG access**

Survey data, together with market price information, show that, while total area cultivated was remarkably resilient to the war, profits per ha for Ukraine’s traditional agricultural export crops halved due to lower output and higher input prices, though land prices suffered only modest declines. High levels of unsatisfied credit demand are one factor limiting small producers’ ability to respond to the associated relative price changes by diversifying into higher value crops. The PSG per-ha grant provides working capital rather than investment support and was indeed used in this way by most recipients, though survey data provide no conclusive evidence on its targeting or impact.

# **3.1 War effects**

For descriptive analysis of how PSG resources help to better deal with war impacts, we use data from two rounds of a nationwide phone survey of small and medium-scale farmers conducted by MAPF.<sup>17</sup> specifically for this purpose. Using all producers registered in SAR by October 15, 2022, as a frame, the sample was stratified by whether or not an application for PSG had been lodged by this date and by four

> 14 Location of fields in areas outside of the government-maintained list of conflict-affected locations is verifiable from parcels’ cadastral numbers. 15 Due to restricted interoperability with the registry of rights, the amount of PSG funds obtained was based on farmers’ declaration of total area cultivated rather than on automatically aggregating total cultivated area from the parcels to which the farm had registered rights. Fully automated controls are expected to be hard-coded in future versions of the SAR software.

> 16 Reasons for excluding farms were that (i) some or all of the parcel shapefiles needed for overlays with crop cover data was missing for 605 farms; (ii) 530 farms were excluded as they did not cultivate summer crops but only winter crops and pastures in the 2019 to 2023 period; (iii) although they received grants only for the area located in non-conflict areas, 227 farms also had registered parcels in the conflict zone, making them quite different from the rest; and (iv) 28 farms had 2022 cultivated area in excess of the 120 ha cutoff.

> 17 The survey was implemented by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, with financial support from the European Commission, under the guidance of the World Bank in collaboration with the School of Economics.

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