Port of Constanta has shipped almost 12 million tons of Ukrainian grain since the beginning of the full-scale war

UkrAgroConsult

The largest Romanian seaport of Constanta shipped almost 12 mln tons of Ukrainian grain after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, including 8.6 mln tons in 2022 and 3.33 mln tons in the first quarter of 2023. This is evidenced by the data of the Constanta Port Authority.

In total, Constanta shipped 24.01 mln tonnes of grain in 2022, and 6.6 mln tonnes in the first quarter of 2023. Thus, last year, Ukrainian grain accounted for 36% of the port’s total grain export traffic, and in the first quarter of this year it exceeded 50%.

Most of the Ukrainian grain is delivered to Constanta by barge via Ukrainian ports on the Danube, with cargo also arriving by rail and road. Several stevedoring companies handle Ukrainian cargo in the port. Comvex and TTS handle more than half of Ukrainian cargo.

However, Ukrainian grain exports through Constanta are likely to come under pressure in the new marketing season due to the expected high grain harvest in Romania this year. According to the consulting company Agritel, Romanian farmers may increase wheat harvest this year to 10.35 million tons, recovering from last year’s drought. For its part, the consulting company AGRIColumn forecasts that this year’s winter crop in the country will exceed the five-year average.

“The new harvest in Romania seems to be bigger than last year. This means that there may be less room for Ukrainians. The operators will not harm their traditional customers,” Viorel Panait, director of Comvex, told Reuters.

According to the Comvex executive, who also heads the Constanta Port Business Association, more efficient management of truck traffic and port traffic can help handle the growing cargo flow in the absence of new port storage capacity, which currently stands at about 2 million tons. AGRIColumn has a similar opinion: to solve the congestion problem, the port needs investments and a unified IT traffic dispatching system.

Instead, a practical solution that can avoid excessive congestion in intra-port logistics and find additional capacity resources may be to increase the capacity of roadside transshipment in the waters of Constanta. Transshipment at the roadstead was first organized by the Romanian transport and logistics company TTS last summer. Since then, the technical capabilities of transshipment on the water have been increasing due to the systematic involvement of additional floating cranes, which as of May this year amounted to almost 20. According to Cargill trader Alexandru Nyag, under favorable weather conditions, such a technical resource can handle 9 million tons of Ukrainian grain in the next grain season at the port’s roadstead alone. One of the joint projects of roadside transshipment in Constanta is being implemented by TTS and UDP, which plan to increase the volume of transshipment.

Although Constanta has attracted Ukrainian grain traffic after the invasion, which now exceeds one-third of all grain traffic, 2021 remains the port’s most successful grain year so far, when a record 25.2 million tons of grain was shipped. In addition to Romanian cargo, the port’s stevedores handled grain from Serbia, Hungary, Austria, and Moldova.

In total, in 2022, after the start of the large-scale Russian invasion and the reorientation of Ukrainian export-import traffic, the port of Constanta handled 11.85 million tons of Ukrainian cargo. In addition to grain, the port handled Ukrainian iron ore, containers, etc. The handling of Ukrainian cargo helped the port of Constanta achieve a record cargo turnover in 2022, increasing the figure by 12% compared to 2021, to 75.5 million tons.

Tags: Ukraine, export, wheat, Constanta