KIEV, Nov 29 (Reuters) – High energy costs and a delayed harvest are making Ukrainian corn too expensive to export successfully in early 2022, a trader said on Monday.
“You can see a big picture, which shows that at current prices after the New Year, we have nowhere to sell corn,” Tymur Shyshlov of Risoil Ukraine told the agricultural consultancy APK-Inform. He added that Ukraine’s physical prices must fall or global trends must increase.
Ukraine plans to harvest a record 40 million tonnes of corn this year and more than 30 million tonnes could be exported. The country sold 23 million tons of corn abroad in the 2020-21 season of its 2020 harvest of 30.3 million tons.
But traders and analysts say rising global gas values ​​and a rise in domestic prices have increased the net cost of Ukrainian corn, forcing farmers to delay harvest in hopes that crops will lose. its additional moisture when staying in the fields.
Post-harvest corn must be dried for later long-term storage in silos.
Shyshlov said that an increase in logistics costs and a record corn harvest in South America were additional factors that could affect Ukraine’s exports.
Ukraine has exported 5.5 million tons of corn so far this season, almost the same volume as on the same date in 2020, data from the Ministry of Agriculture showed.
(Report by Pavel Polityuk. Edited in Spanish by Javier Leira)
