23mn chickens live at any one time on a stretch of Vinnytsia farmland. Around 8mn are slaughtered every week. The villages nearby have complained for years about the environmental impact.
One of the largest poultry farms in Europe, the Vinnytsia Poultry Farm belongs to MHP (LSE: MHPC), the Cyprus-registered, London-listed agribusiness that is Ukraine's dominant chicken producer. The site spans 100,000 hectares of farmland, according to a report on MHP’s operations by the NGO CEE Bankwatch, shared with IntelliNews. It gets through more than 6mn cubic metres of water a year and produces organic waste on a scale comparable to the whole of London, says the report.
Two international accountability offices are now investigating whether the development institutions that backed it followed their own rules - the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s (EBRD’s) Independent Project Accountability Mechanism and the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC’s) Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman. Their findings are due to be published later this year. Between them the EBRD, the IFC and the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) have put more than $1.5bn into MHP.
“These institutions have social and environmental policies designed to keep their projects from harming local communities and their environments,” says the Bankwatch report.
“In theory, these safeguards should have prevented significant impacts like water pollution and damage to local infrastructure. The policies should also have ensured that local communities had a say in the development of the VPF [Vinnytsia Poultry Farm]. Yet these safeguards failed to identify or prevent the harms from the VPF.”
What the wells show
The villagers' allegations, set out in the May 2026 report by CEE Bankwatch Network, run from pesticides and manure by-products spread on local fields and washing into groundwater, through nitrate contamination reaching wells used for drinking water, to road safety and cracked houses from constant heavy vehicle traffic, and health and safety conditions inside MHP's own facilities.
Testing carried out with community participation in March 2026 excess nitrate revealed dangerous nitrate levels at seven wells tested, with the most concerning result at a well in Olianytsia, where nitrate concentrations spiked to a new high of 585 mg/l, according to Bankwatch.
MHP has built a wastewater treatment facility and a biogas plant that turns chicken manure into energy for the farm, and presents these as the answer to its pollution and climate impact. What it has not produced, the report says, is meaningful data or baseline studies that would allow anyone to judge the effect either way.
A bypass road promised at the start of the development arrived a decade late and was built to a design and capacity that did not work. Heavy vehicles still run through the villages.
MHP launches assessment
Asked about the findings, a company representative told IntelliNews: "We take the information referred to in your query very seriously. MHP is deeply committed to protecting the environment in the areas where it operates. This commitment is an integral part of the company's sustainable development strategy."
The company said an assessment of potential sources of water pollution has been started in the areas around its Vinnytsia facilities. "Our operations are carried out with measures in place to prevent adverse impacts on water quality. We are confident in the effectiveness of these measures and, once the results of the ongoing assessment become available, will carefully review the findings and take appropriate action as required."
It also disputed the attribution. "It is important to note that MHP is not the only company with large industrial facilities in the area," the representative said. "The region is home to a number of major agricultural and industrial enterprises, all of which are subject to Ukrainian environmental legislation. Therefore, determining the source of any environmental issue requires objective scientific analysis." The company said it remained committed to cooperating with public authorities, independent experts and environmental technology providers.
Years of talks
Residents of Olyanytsya, Zaozerne and Kleban filed formal complaints with both banks' accountability offices back in 2018. Offered a choice between a compliance review of the bank's own conduct and mediated dialogue with the company, they chose dialogue.
However, Bankwatch’s report says 23 meetings over three and a half years produced no final agreement, after which MHP withdrew from the process. The villagers then went back and asked for the compliance review they had originally passed over, and after further delay both offices opened investigations.
Progress since has been thin. "There are not many developments with the EBRD," Vladlena Martsynkevych of CEE Bankwatch told IntelliNews. "Aside that we know the management is obliged now to come up with the Management Action Plan to the complaint findings (not public for now).”
According to Martsynkevych, a discussion with the IFC revealed the development institution is working with MHP on behalf of the company’s funders on the ongoing Environmental and Social Action Plan. “But this is also not public," she added. "So, we will demand transparency on those processes."
An EBRD spokesperson declined to comment on the report to IntelliNews. However, Martsynkevych said Bankwatch representatives had discussed the issue with the bank’s executive directors - its highest decision-making body - at its annual meeting in Riga in June. “[We] put some pressure on the bankers to come up with 'good' Management Action Plan in response to the complaint findings,” she said. “We got reassurances they will be ready for that.”
Wartime conditions
The farm is a significant employer as well as an internationally financed development project, and villagers who raised concerns have faced verbal and physical attacks, according to the Bankwatch report. Development banks, the NGO claims, consistently underestimate the impacts of factory farming and misclassify agribusiness projects as having minor or reversible effects, a tendency that fast-tracking under the banner of wartime aid has made worse.
Every new investment in MHP is now framed as support for a country at war. Under wartime conditions, state environmental monitoring has been disrupted, and information about the company's expansion plans and their local effects has become harder to obtain.
MHP performed strongly following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Sales reached $3.8bn in 2025 with EBITDA of $641mn, and third-quarter revenue rose 29% year on year to $1bn with net profit up 46% to $140mn. However, the company's performance weakened in the first quarter of 2026; while revenue increased by 31% y/y to $1.0bn, it reported a net loss of $85mn, mainly reflecting a $53mn non-cash foreign exchange loss.
The company’s website stresses its contribution to Ukraine’ food security, as well as its payments into the country’s budget; it has been the largest taxpayer in the agricultural sector for several years.
Ukraine's EU accession bid is expected to tighten the regulatory framework. In the meantime, however, "There are good laws that are stuck in the parliament - like the one on Nitrates Directive which would legalise the necessity to track [or] improve the agri pollution into water," Martsynkevych said. Environmental reform is not treated as a wartime priority, she added, the accession chapters on green transition are seen as very expensive to implement, and in talks with Brussels the government has been asking for extended implementation periods.
The Ministry of Economy, Agriculture and Environment, merged into a single body last year, "has internal conflicts of interest and not an effective regulator", she added.
MHP has been expanding across Southeast Europe, and it has run into issues in the EU. In Croatia, the company put a planned investment on hold in August after pressure from local communities, according to Greenpeace. Bankwatch says it is supporting Croatian colleagues by commenting on environmental impact assessments and supporting documents, and campaigners recently mounted an exhibition on the threats of livestock production including cases from Ukraine.
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