A plan proposed by U.S. President Joe Biden to see grain exported from Ukraine has received scrutiny from Poland, which has raised the alarm.
Poland has pointed out a number of problems with a plan presented by U.S. President Joe Biden to finally enable grain to be exported out of Ukraine, in peacetime a major exporter of agricultural products.
With tens of millions of tons currently stuck in the country as a result of an ongoing Russian blockade of the Black Sea, President Biden has suggested building a host of silos on the Ukrainian-Polish border to help move the globally relied upon grain out of the war-torn nation by rail.
However, Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Henryk Kowalczyk, has poked holes in the plan, saying that — while he thinks it is “remarkably interesting” — the scheme is lacking in detail, and would likely take months to complete.
“…for the time being it is a preliminary declaration which requires many detailed solutions to be worked out,” Kowalczyk said in a post uploaded online.
“At the same time, it should be noted that this type of investment will take approximately three to four months to complete,” he continued, having also said that Poland is only capable of taking 1.5 million tonnes of grain per month, when the ability to shift 5 million tonnes per month is required by Ukraine.
The Joe Biden grain export plan echoes a similar scheme put forward by the European Union, which aimed to outfox apparent Russian efforts to block Ukrainian crops from leaving the country by exporting produce over the invaded state’s land borders.
However, this plan was indirectly rebuffed by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, who had concluded last month that any scheme aiming to export stuck Ukrainian grain by land is “highly unlikely” to succeed.
“Ukraine’s overland export mechanisms are highly unlikely to substitute for the shortfall in shipping capacity caused by the Russian blockade,” the ministry wrote on social media last month, while also saying that commercial entities had been deterred from getting involved in the region due to the threats brought by war.
As another plan to export grain by land, it is unclear how Biden expects his plan to be any different from those posed before and, by extension, how they will get around the poor export mechanisms present in Ukraine, as pointed out by the UK Ministry of Defence. As Poland notes, the U.S. plan is light on detail.
Nevertheless, with nations in regions like North Africa and the near-east traditionally reliant on grain imports and Ukraine being a large part of that picture, ever-increasing food commodity prices are beginning to have a brutal knock-on effect on vulnerable people in the developing world.
For example, the World Food Programme has been forced to cut off nearly two million people in South Sudan from its food aid, due to the fact that the organisation simply does not have the resources to service the population.
“It’s a drastic cut because it’s a third of the total of people that we know require food assistance, but we had to do a kind of triage, if you will,” a spokesman for the group said earlier this week.
“We had to decide who to keep assisting and who we can afford to suspend the assistance from – not because they’re not in need but because they can survive,” they continued, emphasising the tough decisions the organisation was now facing as a result of current global food supply instability.
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