The Times - UK (2022-05-23)

14 Monday May 23 2022 | the times

News

Europe is wrestling with a problem not
much larger than the length of a stan-
dard HB pencil as it struggles to get an
estimated 20 million tonnes of grain
out of Ukrainian silos and into coun-
tries teetering on the edge of famine.
With Ukraine’s Black Sea ports

Race against time to avert

famines with grain trains

Oliver Moody blockaded by the Russian navy, ship-
ments of wheat, maize, sunflower seeds
and other crops are being delayed for
up to 30 days at the country’s land bor-
ders as it shifts its exports to rail.
One of the most significant obstacles
on these routes is the 85mm that sepa-
rates the Ukrainian gauge from that of
its western neighbours, a hangover

from the Soviet era. This means the

cargo has to be reloaded on to Euro-

pean standard-gauge wagons at the

border, leading to queues of as many as

10,000 carriages at some of the busiest

crossings.

Time is running out for everyone in-

volved. The UN has warned of an im-

pending global food crisis that may last

for years as the war cuts off the flow of

cereals, fertilisers and animal feed from

Ukraine and Russia.

Ukraine alone normally produces

enough food to feed 400 million people.

The abrupt halt to its exports has

helped to drive up prices of staples such

as flour and cooking oil, as well as

threatening several states in north

Africa and the Middle East with acute

food shortages.

Yesterday Rüdiger von Fritsch, who

served as Germany’s ambassador to

Moscow from 2014 to 2019, claimed

that this was a deliberate strategy on

President Putin’s part to drive a fresh

wave of migration into Europe.

“Putin’s calculation is that after the

grain deliveries collapse the hungry

people will flee these regions and try to

come to Europe, like the millions of

Syrians who [in the mid-2010s] fled the

horrors of war,” Von Fritsch told Der

Tagesspiegel.

For Kyiv the grain is also an irreplace-

able source of revenue, typically bring-

ing in about £15 billion a year, or about

a third of the country’s annual income

from exports. The government needs

about £5 billion a month to stay afloat

and Ukraine’s economic output is fore-

cast to shrink by more than a third this

year, underscoring its pressing need for

foreign currency.

Ukraine has until July to clear about

15 million tonnes of maize and 6.5 mil-

lion of wheat out of its storage facilities

to make space for this year’s harvest.

Since the ports that would normally

handle 80 per cent of this trade have

been choked off and road haulage capa-

city is limited, much of it must leave the

country by rail.

This is, in the words of Adina Valean,

the European Union’s Romanian

transport commissioner, a “gigantic

challenge”.

For a start, the dozen or so railway

border crossings capable of transfer-

ring the grain have been operating at

their limits, especially in the case of the

biggest of these facilities, at Izov on the

Polish frontier.

At times there have been a total of

more than 25,000 wagons backed up on

the Ukrainian side of the border, ac-

cording to data from the national rail-

way operator. Henryk Kowalczyk, the

Polish agriculture minister, said there

was too little capacity in the system.

“We have to reload [the cargo] or re-set

the railway wagons, so it’s a bottleneck,”

he told Polish radio.

Then there is the question of what to

do with the grain once it arrives in the

EU. Some is transported north to

Poland’s Baltic sea ports, including

Gdansk and Gdynia. Another 60,

tonnes a month passes along a circui-

tous “green corridor” running through

Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria

and Germany, ultimately arriving in

Brake, a north German river port

specialising in cereals.

The European Commission is setting

up what it calls “solidarity lanes” to ease

the blockages on the Ukrainian bor-

ders, matchmaking spare rolling stock

and lorries with outbound shipments

from Ukraine, and giving cereals and

animal feed priority over other exports.

In the long term its aim is to fund new

railway links to Ukraine as a way of

binding the country more closely to the

EU and contributing to its reconstruc-

tion. Yet such is the scale and urgency of

the task that other, more ambitious

routes are coming into play. Romania

has begun repairing an old Soviet

broad-gauge railway line from Giurgi-

ulesti in Moldova to the Danube river

port of Galati. In theory this could al-

low exports to travel on the same wag-

ons all the way from Ukraine to the

Black Sea.

The G7 has recently looked at using

the ports in the three Baltic states, such

as Klaipeda in Latvia. One proposal in-

volved drafting in a fleet of 10,000 lor-

ries to run a five-day shuttle service

between Ukraine and the Black or Bal-

tic seas. This month Marius Skuodis,

the Lithuanian transport minister, said

that negotiations were under way on a

“humanitarian corridor” to take the

grain to the Baltic by way of Belarus,

meaning it could make the entire jour-

ney on old Soviet-gauge railways.

Why the West must defy the Russian

blockade, leading article, page 31

RUSSIA

AUSTRIA ROMANIA

POLAND

BELARUS

LITHUANIA

UKRAINE

250 miles

Klaipeda

Gdansk

Galati

Giurgiulesti

Gdynia

CZECH REP.

FRANCE

GERMANY

Humanitarian corridor

(theoretical)

Polish route

(exists but

limited

capacity)

Polish/Baltic route

(theoretical)

Moldovan

route (being

repaired now)

"Green corridor"

(currently in

operation)

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News War in Ukraine