At their meetings, the G7 foreign and agriculture ministers will discuss urgent measures to break the Russian blockade of grain exports from Ukraine’s ports, including an attempt to open routes through Romanian and Baltic ports. Germany.

The grain export ban has quickly become one of the country’s most pressing diplomatic and humanitarian crises Ukraine. On Tuesday, US President Joe Biden said the US was working on solutions to “get this food out into the world so it can help bring prices down.”

The G7 foreign ministers are meeting in the resort town of Weissenhaus in northeastern Hamburg and agriculture ministers in Stuttgart on the Baltic Sea.

Cem Ozdemir, Germany’s agriculture minister and Green Party member, had been searching with the European Union for months about alternative train routes through Poland and Belarus to the Baltic ports, but the different train gauges between Ukraine and Poland, a past backlog of traffic and a lack of proper rail cars all count against This option.

According to one Ukrainian estimate, only 20% of the exports that Ukraine normally sends through the Black Sea ports can be transported by rail to the Baltic ports. The cost of ground transportation has increased fivefold in the past year.

Before the war, most of Ukraine’s food — enough to feed 400 million people — was exported through the country’s seven Black Sea ports. In the eight months before the conflict broke out, nearly 51 million metric tons of grain passed through it, according to the United Nations World Food Program. Ukraine’s trade is worth $47 billion (£38 billion) annually.

Ukraine’s Minister of Agricultural and Food Policy, Mykola Solsky, has examined options ranging from Gdansk or east to the port of Klaipeda in Lithuania and three ports in Latvia. Baltic ports lost trade from them Russia And Belarus, including potash, has spare capacity at the moment.

The Roman port of Constanta also took some Ukrainian grain shipments, but ships carrying grain towards Turkey would probably need to stay within Roman waters.

The United Nations also discussed whether a humanitarian corridor could be opened through Belarus to transport grain to the Baltic ports because the route scale between Ukraine and Belarus is standardized.

David Beasley of the United Nations World Food Program, which has been sounding the alarm for weeks, warned: “Right now, the granaries in Ukraine are full. At the same time, 44 million people around the world are walking towards starvation. We have to open these ports so that food can From entering and exiting Ukraine. The world demands it because hundreds of millions of people globally depend on the food that comes through these ports.”

Normally, Ukraine will export about 5-6 million tons of grain and 700,000 tons of oilseeds through the Black Sea ports per month. There are cumulative estimates to export anything between 15 and 20 million tons according to the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club.

Markyan Dmitrasevich, Ukraine’s appointed deputy agriculture minister, said exports by rail could expand to 600,000 tons to 1 million tons, but that it would take 18-24 months to clear existing stocks, before any new crop was added. In April, only 560,000 metric tons were exported by rail from Ukraine.

“We need a Plan A that liberates the ports of Ukraine, and we are constantly saying and conveying this message … This may alleviate the global crisis that may arise from hunger,” said Roman Slaston, general manager of the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club.

After Russian missiles hit the port city of Odessa on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned: “Without our agricultural exports, dozens of countries in different parts of the world are already on the brink of food shortages. The poorest will be hit the hardest. The political repercussions for this will be dire.”

David Miliband, chief executive of the International Rescue Committee, said: “For now, I think it’s at least as likely that the sanctions against Russia will blame the rise in food prices as the invasion of Ukraine does. There is a huge competition to be won over public opinion globally.”

There are already signs that Russian diplomacy is trying to shift the blame. Sergei Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, claimed, during a visit to Oman, that the Ukrainian authorities were refusing to allow ships carrying wheat from their ports, and had mined the areas around the ports. Ukraine said the accusations were absurd.

In 2020, Ukraine was the world’s fifth largest exporter of wheat, and low- and middle-income countries were important beneficiaries. The main export destinations were Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Lebanon.

In Egypt, where a third of the population lives below the official poverty line and depends on state-subsidized bread, flour prices have risen by 15%. The general inflation rate for April exceeded 13%.

In the month following the start of the conflict, wheat and maize export prices rose by 22% and 20%, respectively, on top of sharp increases in 2021.

These increases are likely to continue since the sowing drive for Ukrainian farmers was delayed by up to a fifth due to shortages of herbicides, cold weather, diesel fuel and vehicle traffic due to curfews, Solsky said. Farmers switched from spring crops to sunflower seeds and soybeans. It is estimated that about one fifth of Ukrainian agricultural land is now in the hands of Russia.