2024-02-19 19:33:03
Shipments of Ukrainian grain through Romania’s Black Sea port of Constanta fell in January by 38 percent year-on-year, port authority data showed, raising fears among operators that export routes established after the Russian invasion will lose their role as Kiev begins to uses its own ports more, reported Reuters.
Ukraine is one of the world’s biggest grain exporters, and Constanta has become Kiev’s biggest alternative export route since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, with grain arriving by road, rail and by barge on the Danube .
Ukrainian exports through Constanta, which did not exist before the war, reached 8.6 million metric tons in 2022 and jumped to 14 million tons last year, helped by EU-funded investment in the port and additional equipment provided by operators.
Transit volumes fell to 436,000 tonnes in January from 700,000 tonnes a year earlier, port authorities told Reuters.
“The feeling among the operators is that the volumes are falling, the Ukrainian corridor through the country’s own ports is working,” Viorel Panait, manager of the Comvex operator, told the agency.
Ukraine established a shipping corridor from its own ports in August that runs along the western Black Sea coast near Romania and Bulgaria, soon after Russia pulled out of a UN-brokered deal on grain exports via the Black Sea.
Panait, who is also chairman of the Constanța Port Business Association, said new grain export control mechanisms introduced by Kiev last year to prevent tax evasion had contributed to the decline.
He added that Romanian port operators, logistics and rail companies have invested to increase capacity because of Ukrainian grain, and EU funding support schemes are also underway.
“There are fears that these export routes created in the last two years will be lost. Given the equivalent costs of transport through Ukrainian ports and Constanta, a rational way to preserve the new flows … would be reasonable,” he added he.
Still, some market analysts said they expected volumes to start picking up again in the spring.
“We see a lull in the market, Ukrainian farmers are hesitant to sell at such low prices, but exports will resume in March-April,” Cesar Gheorghe of Romanian grain market consultancy AGRIColumn told Reuters.
He estimated that Romanian farmers will have an exportable surplus of 20-22 million tonnes of grain in the 2024/25 season.
In January, Jim O’Brien, assistant secretary in the US State Department’s Office of European and Eurasian Affairs, said he expected Romania to remain Ukraine’s largest alternative route for grain and other exports after its own ports. BTA.