ISTANBUL — Three more ships with grain have left Ukrainian ports and are headed to Turkey for inspection, Turkey’s defense ministry said Friday, evidence that a UN-backed deal is working to export Ukrainian grain that has been trapped by Russia’s invasion.
The three ships are loaded with over 58,000 tons of corn.
Much of the grain that Ukraine exports is used as animal feed, experts say.
Ukraine is one of the world’s main breadbaskets and the stocks of grain trapped were exacerbating a sharp rise of food prices and raising fears of a global hunger crisis.
The departure of the ships comes after the first grain shipment since the start of the war left Ukraine earlier this week. It crossed the Black Sea under the breakthrough wartime deal and passed inspection Wednesday in Istanbul and then headed on to Lebanon.
The ships that departed Friday from Ukraine are from among over a dozen bulk carriers and cargo ships that had been loaded with grain and stuck at the ports there since the start of Russia’s invasion in late February.
While tens of thousands of tons of grains are now making their way out with these latest shipments, it’s still a fraction of the 20 million tons of grains which Ukraine says are trapped in the country’s silos and ports, and which must be shipped out in order to make space for this year’s harvest.
Around six million tons of that trapped grain is wheat, and just half of that is for human consumption, said David Laborde, an expert on agriculture and trade at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington D.C.
Prices of grains peaked in the first weeks after Russia’s invasion, but some have since come down to their pre-war levels. Corn prices are running around 70 percent above the levels seen at the end of February 2020, before the pandemic, according to Jonathan Haines, senior analyst and data and analytics firm, Gro Intelligence. He said wheat prices are currently 63 percent above the levels seen at the end of February this year, when the invasion was launched. (AP)