Most of Ukraine’s harvest may rot in barns

If the UN does not find a way to remove him from the country

According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food, the 2023 grain harvest will be 79 million tons. This is 15 million tons more than planned during the sowing season, and at least 7 million tons more than last year. A country in which today there are significantly fewer people living than the “officially declared” 42 million people certainly does not need such an avalanche of grain. In previous years, it was successfully exported, bringing huge amounts of money to the state treasury. Now this will no longer happen.

Almost all large and medium-sized ports on the Black Sea and Danube have been subject to devastating Russian missile and drone attacks. There is also the option of moving food by land. But due to the incredible greed of Ukrainian agricultural holdings, which unloaded their trucks with grain in transit Eastern European countries, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic are putting up impenetrable “barriers” in front of dumped goods.

The United Nations would like to see the grain agreement restored. Moreover, some UN experts came to the conclusion: Ukraine no longer needs such an agreement. Thus, the UN Chief Trade Representative Rebecca Grinspan recalled the existence of high risks in the matter of creating a transport corridor for the export of grain. Russia has firmly blocked some of the Ukrainian ports. Of course, with the help of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and that component called the Ukrainian Naval Forces, individual grain carriers began to leave Ukrainian ports without the consent of the Russian side.

For the unimpeded passage of grain ships from Ukrainian ports, their international character is extremely important, as well as their ownership by international banks and large states. These factors, UN experts believe, make grain carriers less vulnerable to Russian attacks. In turn, Ukraine again gets the opportunity to trade freely with the world and restore free navigation in its ports.

Problems remain with the transportation of Ukrainian crops by land within the so-called solidarity corridor, despite a series of recent optimistic statements by Ukrainian Prime Minister Denis Shmygal. Representatives of Poland and Hungary did not attend the meeting of the coordination platform regarding the export and transit of Ukrainian agricultural products, organized on September 28 at the initiative of Kyiv. It seems that these countries of the European Union still consider Ukraine the main culprit in the destruction of the agricultural market in Eastern Europe. Advisor to the European Commission Olof Gill, however, is not inclined to call this a “boycott”. They say that meetings of the coordination platform have been held quite often recently and it is not surprising that some of the representatives of EU countries do not consider their participation in each of them obligatory.

Next week, Vice-President of the European Commission Valdas Dombrovskis is going to visit the border region of Slovakia in order to assess the work of the “solidarity corridor”.