The green ears of wheat are already ripening. Soon, the horizon will resemble the Ukrainian flag, a golden sea under the blue sky. Chubuk expects to harvest 500 tons, but for the first time in his 30 years as a farmer, he’s not sure what to do with it. “Hope is the only thing I have now,” he said. The war has trapped some 22 million tonnes of grain inside Ukraine, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a growing crisis for the country known as the “breadbasket of Europe” for its exports of wheat, corn and sunflower oil. Before Russia’s invasion, Ukraine could export 6 to 7 million tons of grain a month, but in June it shipped only 2.2 million tons, according to the Ukrainian Grain Union. Normally, it sends about 30 percent of its grain to Europe, 30 percent to North Africa and 40 percent to Asia, said Mykola Horbachov, head of the association. With Russia’s blockade of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports, the fate of Ukraine’s upcoming harvest is in doubt. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says the war threatens food supplies for many developing countries and could worsen hunger for up to 181 million people. Meanwhile, many farmers in Ukraine could go bankrupt. They are facing the most difficult situation since they won their independence in 1991, Khorbachev said. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said his country was working with the UN, Ukraine and Russia to find a solution, offering safe Black Sea corridors for wheat shipments. For now, Ukraine is trying less efficient alternatives to export its grain, at least to Europe. Currently, 30% of exports go through three Danube River ports in southwestern Ukraine. The country is also trying to send grain through 12 borders with European countries, but trucks have to wait in line for days and Europe’s infrastructure cannot yet absorb such a volume of grain, Khorbachev said. “It is impossible to build such infrastructure in one year,” he told The Associated Press. Russia’s invasion also sent transportation costs skyrocketing. The delivery price for this year’s harvested barley at Romania’s nearest port, Constanta, is now $160 to $180 per ton, up from $40 to $45. And yet a farmer who sells barley to a trader gets less than $100 per ton. The losses are piling up, along with the harvest. “Most farmers run the risk of going bankrupt very soon. But they have no choice but to sell their grain cheaper than its cost,” Horbachov said. Apart from such challenges, not all farmers can sell their grain. Before the invasion, Chubuk could sell a ton of wheat from his farm in the Kiev region for $270. Now he can’t find a buyer even at $135 per ton. “The whole system backs up,” including storage options, said James Heneghan, senior vice president of Gro Intelligence, a global climate and agriculture data analytics company. The system was intended to keep Ukraine’s exports flowing, not store them. With no money coming in for grain, future harvests are challenging. “Farmers have to buy fertilizers, seeds, diesel, pay wages,” Khorbachev said. “Ukrainian farmers can’t print money.” The country has not yet run out of warehouses as the harvest begins. Ukraine has about 65 to 67 million tons of commercial grain storage, according to Horbachov, although 20 percent of that is on Russian-occupied territory. Farmers themselves can store 20 to 25 million tons, but a part of it is also in occupied areas. Until the end of September, when the harvest of corn and sunflower seeds begins, Ukraine will face a shortage of storage capacity. FAO recently announced a $17 million project to help address the storage shortfall. Gro Intelligence’s Heneghan noted that a temporary solution could be to provide farmers with silo bags for storage. In the eastern and southern regions near the front line, farmers continue to work in their fields despite the threat to their lives. “It can end in a moment with shelling, or as we see now, the fields are burning,” said Yuriy Vakulenko in the Dnipropetrovsk region, with black smoke visible in the distance. Its workers are risking their lives for little return, with storage facilities now refusing to take their grain, Vakulenko said. Ukraine had a record-breaking grain harvest last year, gathering 107 million tonnes. This year even more was expected. Now, in the best-case scenario, farmers will harvest only 70 million tons of grain this year, Horbachov estimated. “Without opening the (Black Sea) ports, I don’t see any solution for Ukrainian farmers to survive,” he said. “And if they don’t survive, we won’t be able to feed the African countries.”
Francesca Ebel, Valerii Rezik and Oleksandr Stashevskyi in Ukraine and Aya Batrawy in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed.
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