Ukrainian farmers facing food export crisis as Russian air strikes hamstring ports

Ukraine’s farmers should be celebrating their biggest harvest in years, but instead many face financial peril as Russian air strikes cripple their country’s main ports, paralyse food exports and turn the Black Sea into the world’s deadliest waterway.

More than 570 ships have been attacked in the Black Sea this year, claiming the lives of more than 40 merchant sailors, with two-thirds of those incidents taking place since a sharp escalation in Russian drone strikes in July.

As the human and financial cost of Black Sea shipping spirals, Ukrainian farmers are having to sell produce at knock-down prices just to keep cash flowing, and world leaders are under pressure to act urgently to stop food-price rises and avert potential shortages in Africa and elsewhere.

“It’s like a perfect storm,” Dmytro Barinov, president of Ukrport, the association of Ukrainian ports, says in his office in Odesa.

“Our farmers harvest from June, and Russia began heavily shelling vessels in July. Ukraine doesn’t have enough storage for its entire crop, and 2026 has been a very good year, with 82 million tonnes of different foodstuffs expected to be harvested. On top of that, we had about 10 million tonnes of last year’s harvest still in storage,” he adds.

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“And then exports through the big terminals of the Odesa ports basically stopped.”

Those three ports – Odesa, Chornomorsk and Pivdennyi – were receiving about 10 ships each day before the latest escalation. Now only about 10 per month, if that, dare to run the gauntlet of Russian drones and missiles, Barinov explains.

“It’s nothing. And the ships that do call are not huge – not so-called Panamax or Capesize vessels any more. If shipowners decide to take the risk, they use smaller and older ships, so they minimise their losses if they are hit. That’s the logic now.”

Several shipping sources said it now costs between five and 10 times more to insure a vessel to call at an Odesa port than at the start of the year – and that extra expense is inevitably passed down the chain, from shipping companies to charterers and trading firms, and ultimately to farmers who receive less for their crops.

“Someone has to pay for everything that’s going on. And ultimately that’s us, the producers,” says Volodymyr Bubnov, who runs a 15,000-hectare farm in western Ukraine.

“In this business, cash comes in basically once a year, when you harvest ... Farmers need the money. They can’t just decide whether to sell now or to wait and hope things improve. They have to pay rent for their land, buy new seeds for the next seeding campaign, buy fuel and fertiliser, repay loans to the bank,” he adds.

“Farmers who are struggling at all with cash flow will have to sell their commodity for a lower price ... The farmer always pays in the end. We don’t have a choice. We are basically trapped.”

Bubnov says mid-July was the last time he exported some of his crop through the Odesa ports, while in a normal year – and even during most of the full-scale war – grain would be “flowing to the ports constantly”.

He is confident that his harvest will be safely stored in giant silo bags and in the farm’s new grain elevator, and its location near the Polish border places it on an alternative, overland export route for Ukrainian commodities.

But rail and road transport, and smaller ports on the Danube river near its outflow into the Black Sea, cannot match the immense capacity of the Odesa ports.

“One ship can hold 100,000 tonnes of grain,” says Barinov. “That is the equivalent of 5,000 trucks. And 5,000 drivers, 5,000 sets of documents and border-crossing procedures. It’s impossible to replace Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.”

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This year’s harvest was Ukraine’s biggest since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, and testimony to the resilience of farmers in a country that has lost millions of hectares of land to occupation and contamination by mines and other explosives.

Agricultural products make up nearly 60 per cent of Ukraine’s export revenue, and the bumper crop should have been a bright spot in a bleak economic picture, as the nation continues to rely on western funding to plug large holes in its budget.

Officials says Russia’s throttling of the Black Sea ports could cut Ukraine’s farm exports by half, and in combination with widespread damage to infrastructure may knock 1.5 per cent off the country’s gross domestic product.

“It’s bad for everyone,” says Artem Volkov, head of maritime law at the ANK law practice in Odesa.

“As well as attacks on merchant vessels, there have been many Russian attacks on port infrastructure. On silos where grain is stored, on ship-loading machines and tanks of vegetable oils. So trading companies are suffering too.

“Farmers are trying to keep their harvest in inland silos, but all of them are full. They are afraid to store produce in port silos because of the risk of attack. If a silo is attacked, they could lose everything in one moment.”

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Russia blockaded Ukraine’s ports in early 2022, before a deal brokered by the United Nations and Turkey in July that year allowed grain to be exported from Odesa.

That arrangement collapsed the following summer when Russia refused to extend the deal, but Ukraine successfully opened its own “grain corridor” from Odesa to the Bosporus, hugging the coastlines of Nato members Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.

In recent weeks, however, marine and aerial drones have struck several ships plying that route to and from Ukraine, leaving at least 30 sailors dead or missing. Bucharest and the European Union blame Russia for the attacks, some of which took place in Romania’s territorial waters and in Bulgaria’s exclusive economic zone.

Earlier this year, Russian ports on the Black Sea and partly occupied Sea of Azov came under heavy attack from Ukrainian drones, as Kyiv stepped up strikes on Russian energy infrastructure and the “shadow fleet” Moscow uses to evade oil sanctions.

Ukrainian threats to Russia’s southern ports have forced it to find different outlets for its grain, redirecting some to the Baltic and, last week, sending a shipment even further north to the Arctic port of Murmansk on the Barents Sea.

The Black Sea is now more dangerous than the Strait of Hormuz – where 121 ships have been attacked and 24 sailors confirmed killed this year – and the severe disruption to shipping could affect parts of the world where food supply is often precarious.

Russia and Ukraine accounted for more than a quarter of world wheat exports last year, much of which went through the Black Sea to the ports of North Africa and then south through the continent.

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy discussed the crisis with Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan this weekend, and said they would work together to re-establish a Black Sea grain corridor.

“This issue should be resolved at the highest political level,” says Barinov. “It’s a global situation. All the world is suffering from Hormuz and from the situation here as well. It’s about oil in one case, and food in our case.”

Bubnov says Ukraine’s farmers will keep going, whatever the obstacles. And it is up to others to ensure that what they grow reaches those who need it.

“At the end of the day, the way I look at it, we help to feed the world. And if that’s our job, we just have to do it.”