The harvest has come in well this year in the Odesa region. Oleksandr Chumak, who has farmed its black earth for eleven years, moved his combines from wheat and barley into corn, soybeans and sunflower, and the yield, as CNBC reports, has been strong. In any other country this would be news for celebration. Chumak has had enough. Around 80% of his grain cannot be sold at a profit, he says, and he is out of cash.
His problem is measured not in bushels but in geography. Storage facilities in both Ukraine and Russia — and there is a bitter symmetry here, the granaries of the two warring nations swelling alike — are stuffed with millions of tons of produce that would once have sailed for Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Russian drone and missile strikes on Black Sea targets intensified through the summer and into autumn, until no insurer would write a policy on a commercial ship. Kyiv’s retaliatory attacks have now trapped Russian exports too. Fatal attacks on the water continued into October, and Turkey, alarmed for global food security, is straining to broker a deal whose prospects look slim.
Sleeping between explosions
For the farmers themselves — those not drafted to the front — the war is not a matter of shipping lanes but of the night. “We are living and working in a place where any time you or your circle can be hit by [a] rocket or drone,” Chumak said by phone. “We are sleeping in beds with explosions 300 to 1,000 metres around.” In Sumy region, on the border, men still work the fields under massive shelling; in Kharkiv, the loaders run in temporary storage while the elevators that hold the crop become military targets. The silobags lie across the fields like long white worms, waiting for a sea that will not open.
Why should we plant?
Andrii Dykun, chairman of the Ukrainian Agri Council, puts the arithmetic of despair plainly. “For the farmers, it’s very difficult because we need to pay taxes, we need to pay rent for land, and now we are not able to do this because we are not able to sell anything,” he said. “The only crops we are able to sell are rapeseeds and sunflower seeds. But still, the volume is not enough... So why should we plant if today we have no profits at all?”
If our stocks will be full, it makes no sense to do any farm operations in the spring because then it’s just a waste of time and money.
The state is trying to hold the line with credit. PrivatBank, Ukraine’s biggest lender, disbursed 1.53 billion hryvnia ($34.2 million) in working-capital finance to agribusinesses between June and August — more than double the 718 million hryvnia lent in the same period last year. Small and medium producers account for 70% of its agricultural loan book. But Yevhen Zaihraiev, the bank’s chief corporate and SME officer, describes money turning to stone: “Funds effectively remain tied up in grain inventories, while farms still need to cover their ongoing operating expenses and secure financing for the autumn and spring sowing campaigns.”
Some farmers sell early at ruinous prices to keep liquid, Zaihraiev says; those with storage hold back and pray. Next year’s production of grains and oilseeds is forecast at 85 million tonnes, up from 80 million this year — a number that should gladden the world and instead only deepens the glut pressing on silos and silobags. Chumak’s answer follows the pattern the bank already sees across its clients: he will cut planting sharply for next year, abandon corn and barley altogether, and shift to oilseeds and niche crops that need less fertilizer — itself grown dear amid the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran.
A fifth of the world’s barley, and nowhere to go
The world, stomachs first, has a stake in these calculations. In the years before the invasion, Ukraine and Russia together supplied more than half the world’s sunflower oil, nearly a fifth of its barley and 14% of its wheat, according to the UN; Ukraine ranks among the largest growers of corn, feeding China and the European Union. Around 90% of Ukraine’s main agricultural exports have always moved by the Black Sea. In August its grain and legume exports totalled 981,000 tonnes, down about 58% year on year. Earlier rews reporting has traced how months of strikes turned the sea into the most dangerous water since the invasion began, and how drones reached even a grain ship in Romanian waters.
What cushions the world today is luck elsewhere: better wheat and barley in Canada, Australia and Argentina, decent harvests across the Middle East and North Africa. But Europe faces a poor corn harvest with high feed demand, and the United States a weaker corn crop. Benoit Fayaud, senior manager for grains and oilseeds analysis at Expana, warns that a reopened sea would release a wave of cheap grain that could “flip the market fast... with little warning,” cutting prices in other origins by a few dozen dollars. “They have such big stocks it will be bearish for the market all over the world,” he said.
Until then, the detours. Rail, road and river are “difficult and slow from both countries,” Fayaud notes. Poland and Romania resist even temporary transit of Ukrainian grain, fearing a glut that would bury their own farmers. The Danube runs low, a key bridge is damaged, and the Baltic and Georgian routes can carry only a sliver of the usual flow. Dykun is blunt about the mathematics of distance: “So without Black Sea ports, it will not work for us at all.”
There is an old lesson in this, the kind empires learn late and peasants learn first: harvests do not fail only from drought or fire. They fail when the road between the field and the hungry is seized, and the granary becomes not a storehouse but a prison. The grain is there. The buyers are there. Between them lies a sea full of drones — and men like Chumak, counting the metres to the nearest explosion, wondering whether spring is worth the seed.