How to export grain from Ukraine amid seaport blockade

You can read this also in Spanish, Romanian, Croatian and in Italian.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its blockade of the country’s seaports has forced one of the world’s key grain exporters to look for new routes to export its products.

Before the full-scale Russian invasion, more than 90% of Ukrainian grain exports left via its seaports.

This constituted up to 4-5 million tonnes of grains each month, with the Middle East and African countries among the leading consumers of Ukrainian grains.

With Ukrainian seas blocked, other innovative routes – namely, exports via railway, cars and river ports – are being used and explored to allow the grain to reach European countries’ seaports before being exported to final destination points.

This process is being facilitated by the EU Commission initiative of ‘solidarity lanes’ – a set of measures to ease grain exports via all available alternative routes.

Ukraine's grain is mainly being exported to neighbouring countries’ seaports in Romania and Poland.

Potential routes also include exports by railway and trucks to Italian, Croatian, Slovenian, Dutch and Belgian seaports.

The issue with using railways to export the grain, in addition to different border control measures and general unpreparedness of railways, is a different gauge width between Ukrainian and European railways. This means grains must be transferred from one train to another at the border.

Another option is via Belarus, which has the same width of rails as Ukraine, thanks to its Soviet past. The country has previously been used to export vast quantities of potash by rail to the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda, so it could be a potential solution for easing the export issue.

However, the country is under sanctions, and the EU is not ready to lift them in exchange for a new export route.

With the seaports blockade, more than 22 million tonnes of grains remain blocked in Ukrainian storage, while the new harvest is soon on its way. The current situation has seen grain prices rise dramatically.

The ‘solidarity lanes’ initiative has had a positive impact on increasing the number of exports since March.

However, as Markiyan Dmytrasevych, Ukrainian Deputy Agriculture Minister, told EURACTIV in a recent interview, unblocking the seaports is the only way the country can increase grain exports up to pre-war levels.

[Edited by Natasha Foote/Alice Taylor]