In the UK, the environment secretary George Eustice has said the UK is supporting Ukrainian attempts to form a land bridge to facilitate the export of grain from
Ukraine. Speaking on Sky News, Eustice told viewers there was about 25m tonnes of wheat stuck in Ukraine, and that:
We’ve got about 200m tonnes of wheat in store around the world. And so although it’s a small proportion of the overall total, in the current context it is quite significant. And unless we can get it out, there won’t be stores for this year’s harvest to go into.
So we’re looking at what we can do to help to repair railways, to look at land bridges, so that we can get that wheat out across a land border.
It is now very, very perilous to try to get ships into the Black Sea because the area is mined, and in fact, Ukraine themselves have closed their ports for security reasons. So there’s a whole host of reasons why it’s difficult to get shipping into the Black Sea, and to take that wheat out of Odesa.
Eustice also repeated accusations that have been made by Kyiv that
Russia is stealing grain – accusations which Moscow has vehemently denied. He said it was important to stop stolen grain getting to the world’s markets, saying:
The other very sad thing that we’re seeing is that Russia is stealing some wheat from those stores. We’ve got to be able to test the provenance of wheat. The UK is a world leader in being able to test the provenance, that’s the precise region in which a crop was grown, through testing of DNA. That’s what we’ve made available. We’re putting that on the table, £1.5m to support that work.
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