(Ankara) Russia has agreed to extend by two months an agreement that allows Ukraine to export its grain via the Black Sea to countries struggling with famine, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Wednesday.
Turkey and the United Nations (UN) negotiated the agreement last summer with the two warring countries.
The agreement also includes facilitation of Russian food and fertilizer exports, and Moscow maintains that this has not been implemented. Russia therefore threatened to abandon the agreement if its demands were not met by Thursday.
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said on Wednesday that problems will have to be solved “at the technical level”. Neither she nor President Erdogan mentioned any concessions made to Russia.
The extension of the Black Sea Grains Initiative is good news for several countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia that depend on wheat, barley, vegetable oil and other Ukrainian food products, while droughts create famine.
“Ukrainian and Russian products feed the world,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. “They are important because we are still bearing the brunt of a record cost of living crisis. »
The average daily inspections ― used to ensure boats contain only food and not weapons that could help one adversary or the other ― fell from 10.6 in October to 3.2 last month . Grain shipments from Ukraine have also declined in recent weeks.
Moscow denied slowing down. No boat has been allowed to enter Ukraine’s three open ports since May 6.
Meanwhile, Russia is expected to export more wheat than any country has done in a year, or 44 million tonnes, said Caitlin Welsh, director of the Global Food Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
According to her, Russia knows that the less grain Ukraine exports, the more Russia can compensate in the world market.
“The more it restricts Ukraine’s access to Black Sea ports, the better it is for its political influence with its trading partners”, and the more it harms unity among European Union countries in their support for Ukraine.
The deal resulted in the export of over 30 million tonnes of Ukrainian grain, more than half of which went to developing countries. China, Spain and Turkey are the biggest importers.
With Ukraine’s harvest season in June meaning grain must be sold in July, maintaining a trade corridor is important to avoid “taking a large amount of wheat and other grains out of the market”, says William Osnato, a researcher at the data analysis firm Gro Intelligence.