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“Bottom line right now, we just need to get as much as possible across the border,” a US official said, referencing potential storage facilities in Poland and other nearby countries.
The Biden administration and European allies have been working for weeks to build out the European Union’s “solidarity lanes,” a patchwork of ad hoc rail and truck land routes out of Ukraine, with the eventual goal of shipping the bulk of the grain to Romania’s seaports , so it can reach fragile countries across Africa and the Middle East reeling from food shortages and severe drought. But for now, they’re trying to keep it from being stolen by Russian forces or spoiling in makeshift containers inside Ukraine as the fighting continues.
Ukrainian officials are warning that the storage problem will only get worse with the summer harvest. As Biden made his remarks about the silo plans this week, Ukraine’s deputy food minister Markiyan Dmytrasevych was warning members of the European Parliament his country will be short 10 million to 15 million tons of grain storage by October.
“That is why we have an urgent need to set up temporary grain storages,” Dmytrasevych told the European lawmakers.
The EU’s Maja Bakran said Wednesday that the EU is cooperating with “like-minded international partners, like the US, UK, Canada [and] Japan,” to ramp up land-based exports. “They have welcomed the solidarity lanes and are certainly contributing in the implementation,” she said.
The EU hopes that its overland plan could help increase exports by several million tons per month. Ukrainian officials also said this week they’ve been working to create more storage capacity within the country. They’re currently exporting only a fraction of the 5 million to 6 million tons of grain per month that normally is exported via Ukraine’s seaports during its summer wheat harvest, which begins in just a few weeks.
“Everyone wants to help, we just don’t know how. If we could do teleportation [of the grain] it would help a lot,” an EU official said.
There are still immense logistical problems to work out, a second US official said of the overland plans. The biggest hurdle: The land routes require exponentially more time and money to operate than shipping grain via Ukraine’s Black Sea ports. Biden in his remarks earlier this week noted the rail gauges between Ukraine and Poland do not match, so grain needs to be unloaded from rail cars and transferred to new rail lines at the border. The silos aim to speed up that laborious process.
“The sea route is obviously the most efficient and most effective route, but it’s also the most problematic because you have to have Russia’s permission,” US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an interview on Friday after food security meetings at the United Nations earlier this weekend. “In a sense, you have to have Russia’s agreement. And what is the cost and price of that?”
Vilsack noted the overland routes’ challenges with the differing rail systems, “which is why the president suggested at least getting grain moved to temporary storage facilities in Poland.”
The UN continues to lead talks with Russia about reopening Black Sea access to ship Ukrainian goods. But US officials are skeptical the talks will ever reach a resolution, given Moscow’s demand for sanctions relief in return for partially lifting its blockade. Vilsack said he discussed the Black Sea efforts during a meeting with the UN’s humanitarian chief, Martin Griffiths, who is leading the UN negotiations.
“I expressed to him that I continue to have some reservations and some concerns about whether Russia is truly approaching these negotiations in good faith,” Vilsack said.
Turkish officials have signaled an openness to acting as a security guarantee for Ukrainian grain exports against Russian attacks in the Black Sea, but European officials say Kyiv isn’t currently open to the Turkish plans or another alternative that involves shipping grain through Belarus, which has been fighting on Russia’s side in the war, since both options likely require sanctions relief. European officials are also looking into trying to increase exports through Ukraine’s Danube river ports, but it’s expensive and would be able to move only some of the volume.
Vilsack announced this week that the US would also partner with Ukraine to “rebuild and strengthen Ukraine’s agriculture sector,” a key piece of the country’s economy. He said the increased transparency on crop production and other data from Ukraine could help cut down on foreign countries instituting food export restrictions as well as market speculation that’s helped drive up commodity and food prices since Russia’s invasion.
Biden told a virtual gathering of nations at the Major Economics Forum Friday that “with Russia’s war driving up inflation worldwide, threatening vulnerable countries with severe food shortages, we have to work together to mitigate the immediate fallout of this crisis.”
Garrett Downs, Hanne Cokelaere and Christopher Miller contributed to this report.
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