The European Union is to launch a Ukrainian food export plan aiming to outfox Russia in the hopes of easing food shortages.
A plan to outsmart Russia’s blockade of Ukraine is apparently in the works, with the European Union looking to scheme a way of dodging Vladimir Putin’s blockade of the invaded nation so as to ease food shortages.
Historically known as the breadbasket of Europe for the importance of its agricultural exports keeping the continent fed, Ukraine is usually responsible for a substantial share of the global grain trade, a status quo that has now been greatly disrupted by a Russian blockade of the black sea.
Such a blockade is now preventing the likes of wheat and sunflower oil from leaving the country, leading to heightened prices worldwide as well as shortages of certain foods on supermarket shelves.
However, according to a report by POLITICO, the European Union is now crafting a plan to get around this sea blockade, and — by extension — somewhat ease issues surrounding a lack of food both in Europe and beyond.
While solutions involving humanitarian corridors through the Black Sea have been suggested in the past, the EU is reportedly instead planning to achieve a resumption of exports by using rail connections from Ukraine to get the country’s produce to Baltic Sea ports in Poland.
“It’s necessary to organize alternative corridors for export, especially for wheat [and] corn because Ukraine has a lot of stocks,” said Janusz Wojciechowski, the transnational bloc’s farming tsar.
“We want to ensure supply chains for food for Europe and the rest of the world,” he continued.
“The main solution is corridors to [Poland’s] Baltic Sea ports,” Wojciechowski went on to say, with POLITICO noting the commissioner as specifically mentioning the ports of Gdańsk and Gdynia.
However, while such a reroute of produce could end up somewhat easing supply problems in Europe and beyond, issues surrounding the plan mean that implementing it would be easier said than done.
First, there is the issue of pure scale, with millions of tons of grain needing to be exported from a country that does not have the wagons to transport them.
Further complicating matters, Ukraine’s railways are a slightly different size to the global standard used in Europe and elsewhere, as they were built to the old Soviet gauge. This means Ukrainian trains can’t run on European rails and vice-versa, so the already enormously bulky cargos would have to be trans-shipped at the border if it could even get that far, a massive and time-consuming undertaking.
Building a whole new railway in standard gauge to transport grain has been suggested, but this is a project that could very well take years, not months.
Even if such a transport link is established though, difficulties involving the decreased planting of crops in Ukraine due to the war remain, with a reduction in the number of crops being planted in the country combined with a lack of fertiliser abroad meaning that supply shortages could be extended into the medium term.
“Half the world’s population gets food as a result of fertilisers… and if that’s removed from the field for some crops, [the yield] will drop by 50 per cent,” said expert Svein Tore Holsether, who noted that fertiliser stocks are under threat due to stocks from Russia and Ukraine not being available.
“For me, it’s not whether we are moving into a global food crisis – it’s how large the crisis will be,” he continued.
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