The twentieth anniversary of the Law of Ukraine "On state support of the agriculture of Ukraine": is there a future?

The article analyzes the twenty-year history of the existence of the special Law of Ukraine "On State Support of Agriculture of Ukraine". Adopted in 2004, this Law was the need of the hour - it became a key legislative act, which actually laid the foundation for the further qualitative development of agro-protection law. The twenty-year existence of this Law requires an analysis of its evolution and problematic issues, determination of development trends and real impact on social relations. Such a fundamental analysis will make it possible to answer the main question: is this Law able to effectively regulate agro-protection relations in today's complex conditions, taking into account the war and post-war challenges. The conducted research was structured according to three stages of the transformation of the Law of Ukraine "On State Support of Agriculture of Ukraine”: the stage of approbation of the primary model (2004-2008); the stage of anti-crisis modernization (2009­2019); stage of forced modernization (2020 - until today). In general, after analyzing the twenty- year history of the evolution of the Law of Ukraine "On State Support of Agriculture of Ukraine”, we can conclude that this Law does not fulfill the socially important tasks assigned to it. It had the most conceptual appearance in its initial edition; the least conceptual - today. A significant part of its norms throughout the period of its existence remained declarative, which in general had an extremely negative impact on the regulation of agricultural protection relations: declarative, non­working norms created a distorted image of the current system of state support for agriculture. The current agricultural protection legislation does not provide for any "pillars”, i.e., key legal support mechanisms - instead, the Law now contains a scattered list of individual mechanisms with a greater or lesser degree of detail in their regulation. Even the state of war and the need for special support of agricultural producers in the period 2022-2024 did not push the lawmaker to conceptual reform of the current agricultural protection legislation, but the urgent need for its implementation is already obvious.