Where are the ships loaded with grain that have left Ukraine going?

Two of the ships that have left the ports of Ukraine after months of stopping there are headed for Turkey, loaded with corn.

One goes to England.

One in Ireland.

Others go to Italy and China.

None of the ships released so far are heading towards Yemen, Somalia, Ethiopia or other countries facing catastrophic levels of hunger.

Instead, they go where buyers want them to go:

they are commercial ships carrying grain for sale.

The United Nations three of the Ukrainian shipments, those transporting corn to Turkey and Europe, have been described as “grain shipments”. they save lives“.

President Volodymyr Zelensky Ukraine told its counterpart in Botswana on Monday that its country was “ready to remain the guarantor of the world food security“.

But the idea behind the reopening of trade routes to Ukraine is not that the wheat goes directly to the hungry mouths that need it, but that freed shipments will mean more wheat on the world market and, as a result, lower prices.

Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesman for the office of the UN secretary general, said at a press conference on Tuesday that the agreement to unblock Ukrainian ports had already been concluded. lowest world prices of food.

This trend will ultimately help countries facing food shortages, he said.

“In many countries, developing countries, the import of food is not part of a humanitarian operation, it is part of a commercial contract,” he said.

“So the first wave is taking these ships out of Ukrainian ports because they have been there for a long time. More ships will arrive, all with commercial contracts. Some of them will go to developing countries. Others will go to other destinations ”.

The World food program chartered a ship to bring food aid from Ukraine directly to places like Yemen and Somalia, where famine threatens people, officials said.

All other ships, so far, are commercial ships.

Andthe market it is not always efficient to send grain where it is needed.

The first ship to leave Odessa, Ukraine, loaded with grain last week was bound for Lebanon, the country with the highest rate of food inflation, but the ship stopped off Turkey’s southern coast when the buyer of wheat claimed that I didn’t want the shipment anymore because he was five months late.

now it will be resold.

So far, 14 ships have left Ukraine, about half of the ships that had been trapped in the ports there due to the war.

Additionally, there are two ships arriving with two more due to arrive on Tuesday night.

As the number of ships making the voyage increases, they will ease the pressure on Ukrainian grain silos, allowing farmers to fill them new grain.

The UN has created a website to track every ship that leaves Ukraine and keeps a subtotal of the tonnage of grain those ships contain.

Ports, including Odessa and Chornomorsk, must be cleared so that other ships can enter and load grain.

“It is vitally important to open port space in Odessa ports so that we can bring empty ships to load them with grain and take it to places that are in dire need,” said Frederick J. Kenney Jr., interim coordinator for the UN at the Joint Coordination Center, when the first ship left that Ukrainian port for Lebanon.

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