Context: On May 14, 2026, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Kęstutis Budrys said that the United States is pressuring Lithuania to allow Belarusian potash fertilizers to transit through its territory again. This issue became more prominent after Washington lifted sanctions on potash last December. In contrast, Europe has extended its sanctions for another year. So far, Vilnius has said that it intends to comply with them.
Iryna Novikava, a professor, Doctor of Economic Sciences, and head of a department at BSTU, said on the First National Channel of Belarusian Radio’s program Ekspertnyi klub. Politicheskoye radio-shou on May 15, 2026 that Lithuania’s economic growth is decelerating. To support her point, she recalled how she had supposedly disproved the fake about Lithuanian agriculture being more efficient than Belarusian agriculture.
“So they were trying to prove that Lithuanian agriculture is more efficient than Belarusian agriculture. But it turned out to be a complete falsification. First, they claimed that they harvested almost as much wheat as we did, even though our production is higher. <...> I checked the numbers, and it turned out to be a lie. It also turned out that… they harvested twice as little wheat. And there’s also corn, rapeseed — sheer overreporting. I mean, this is not Lithuanian overreporting, but overreporting by our journalists. Well, our journalists, or not ours — I don’t know who wrote it,” said Novikava.
The discussion refers to the article “30 Years of Destruction of the Countryside,” published by Belorusy i Rynok, which focused on Belarusian agriculture and was analyzed during the Klub redaktorov program on the First Information TV Channel on May 2, 2026. Novikava was a guest expert there.
“[The author of the article stated that] we harvested a little over 10 million tons this year, of which 9 million were pure grain, while tiny Lithuania harvested 8 million tons. I asked agricultural specialists, and they said this is impossible,” said Ivan Eismant, head of the Belteleradiocompany.
“I did the calculations using official data. First of all, they did not harvest 8 million [tons] of wheat. That figure includes spelt, corn, and triticale — all of it together. Their wheat harvest was 4.5 million tons, while ours was 9 million tons,” Novikava continued..
That is, Novikava claimed that Lithuania harvested 4.5 million tons of wheat, whereas Belarus harvested 9 million tons. This comparison is based on a manipulation of facts. Novikava is talking about wheat. At the same time, the studio screen shows a quote from the article she is trying to refute. However, there is no mention of wheat; the quote talks about cereal crops. Wheat accounts for only a fraction of all grains.
If we analyze wheat specifically, Lithuania harvested 4.5 million tons last year, and including spring wheat, the figure is even slightly higher — close to 5 million tons. This data comes from the open database of official Lithuanian statistics database. In Belarus, however, the figure of 9 million tonnes does not refer to the wheat harvest. This is the total indicator for all grains and legumes, as explicitly stated by Belstat. Since 2022, Belstat has stopped publishing the percentage of this volume accounted for by wheat. Before that, even in the most productive years, the figure was just under 3 million tons. This is about 1.5 to 2 times less than in Lithuania.
Novikava’s manipulation was to compare the yield of one grain crop in Lithuania to the total yield of grains and legumes in Belarus. The picture is different when we compare the entire harvest: Belarus harvested 9 million tons of grain and legumes, while small Lithuania collected almost 7 million tons. At the same time, Lithuania’s cultivated areas are about 1.5 times smaller than those of Belarus. Therefore, Lithuanian farmers performed more efficiently.
