MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 17th October, 2022) More than 30 countries stopped purchasing Ukrainian grain in June-July of this year, while the number of new customers was significantly lower, according to Sputnik calculations based on data from the UN Comtrade platform.
In the first two summer months of 2022, the volume of supplies of Ukrainian grain fell by 43% ($771 million worth of deliveries against $1.3 billion a year earlier). Countries with developed economies became the main purchasers of Ukrainian grain in June-July this year, as they accounted for 81% of all deliveries.
More than 30 countries, including India, Jordan, Iran, Yemen, Canada, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Japan and the United States, stopped purchasing Ukrainian grain in the two months. In June-July of last year these same countries bought nearly $222 million worth of grain.
Ukraine did attract new customers this summer - Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Luxembourg, Seychelles, Slovakia and Slovenia. They purchased grain worth $2.3 million, which is only 3% of all the sales in June-July 2022.
Romania became the main buyer of grain from Ukraine in June-July this year, displacing China from the first place.
On July 22, Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey signed an UN-brokered initiative to provide a humanitarian maritime corridor for ships with food and fertilizer exports from Ukrainian Black Sea ports. However, Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly said that most of the ships carrying Ukrainian grain did not make it to the world's poorest countries and ended up in Europe. Moscow has also maintained that the part of the deal concerning Russian food products was not working.
On Saturday, UN Coordinator for the Black Sea Grain Initiative Amir Mahmoud Abdulla said that the grain deal was likely to be extended and, possibly, expanded.
