The export of Ukrainian grain in the current marketing year reached 19 million tons

As of the beginning of the second decade of December and since the beginning of the current, 2024/25 marketing year, Ukraine exported 19.089 million tons of grain and leguminous crops. At the same time, 715 thousand tons were shipped only since the beginning of the current month.

As the press service of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine adds, as of December 13 last year, the total figure for shipments was 14.697 million tons, including 1.6 million tons in December. At the same time, in general, in the current marketing year, the export indicators of all major crops are higher than last year. So far, 9.13 million tons of wheat, 1.867 million tons of barley, and 7.776 million tons of corn have been exported this season. And the total export of Ukrainian flour since the beginning of the season and as of December 11 is estimated at 34,100 tons. tons

The largest load this year falls on Ukrainian ports, which handled 90 million tons of cargo this year. Among them, more than 60% was grain itself. That is, the basis of cargo traffic during this period was grain crops—56.1 million tons against 39.4 million tons in 2023. In November alone, seaports of Ukraine processed 7.6 million tons of cargo. By the way, the demand for Ukrainian wheat remains high, especially on the Spanish market, where last week agreements were concluded for the supply of fodder wheat at a price of $237-238 per ton with delivery in January. Analysts of the PUSK agricultural cooperative, established within the framework of the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council, noted this during the briefing. At the same time, the main competition is observed from the side of Russian wheat, which, thanks to its aggressive price policy, dominates the markets of Algeria, Tunisia and the Middle East. But the situation, according to experts, may change in 2025.

According to them, from February to June 2025, Russia will be able to export only 11 million tons of grain due to the introduction of an export quota. This is significantly less than in the previous season, when the quota was 28-29 million tons. An additional influencing factor is the unsatisfactory state of one third of Russian winter crops.

It should be noted that foreign exchange earnings from the export of agricultural products from Ukraine in 2024 will approximately reach $24.5 billion. As noted by the Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food Vitaly Koval, this indicator should become the second largest since the country's independence. He connects this growth in exports with the intensification of agricultural production, which allowed to increase the profit from the sale of agricultural products abroad. As an example, he gave a farm in the Kyiv region, which on irrigated lands received 31 tons of corn per hectare, while the average figure for Ukraine on non-irrigated fields is up to 7 tons per hectare.

In turn, the head of the parliamentary committee on agrarian policy and land relations, Oleksandr Haydu, reminded that in 2024, the country's agrarian sector will account for 11% of GDP and about 60% of foreign exchange earnings. For comparison, in 2023 it amounted to $22.9 billion, or 61% of all Ukrainian trade, and in the pre-war year of 2021, it was $27.7 billion, or about 40%. In fact, according to him, the country is currently close to the second largest agricultural export in history and can end the year with $24.5 billion in exports. This means that agrarians were systematically rebuilt, despite the fact that the country lost part of its territory due to the war.

Moreover, world market experts believe that in the current marketing season, Ukraine, along with the USA, will increase wheat exports. According to the USDA report for December, world trade will decrease by 1 million tons, to 213.7 million tons. At the same time, the experts raised the forecast of the final stocks of wheat in the world to 257.88 million tons, while the estimate of the wheat harvest forecast in Ukraine remained unchanged at 22.9 million tons.