Ukraine farming group calls for urgent end to ports blockade

theguardian.com:

One of Ukraine’s largest farming groups has called for an urgent solution to unblock the country’s Black Sea ports as exports of grain, sunflower and rapeseed are being held up by the Russian naval blockade, driving inflation and shortages around the world.

G7 ministers have held urgent talks about trying to open routes through Romanian and Baltic ports, potentially fed with an army of 10,000 trucks making a five-day trip from Ukraine.

John Rich, the chairman of MHP, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange, said: “If we had a UN agreement in place it would solve an enormous amount of issues.” But he said that without the war ending such a deal was unlikely, piling pressure on prices for grain and seeds used for cooking oil and ethanol around the world into next year.

“We are now in a vicious cycle,” Rich said. “Normally what happens is that farmers cure high prices as [when prices go up] farmers produce more and prices collapse. This time it could be different,” Rich said pointing to a combination of climate change, the Covid pandemic, the war in Ukraine, as well as fertiliser shortages which are hitting production around the world.

He said the world could be looking at a “cascade of export bans”, following India’s block on the export of wheat and Indonesia’s block on palm oil exports, raising the prospect that “the whole concept of globalisation in food production is dead”.

Exports from Ukraine, which produces as much as half the world’s sunflower seeds, a tenth of wheat and up to a fifth of barley and rapeseed, have been severely interrupted by the closure of Ukraine’s ports following Russia’s invasion. Only about 1m tonnes of grain and seed were exported in April compared with more than 5m tonnes of grain and 700,000