When global grain prices started falling last year, Poland's then agriculture minister urged farmers to hang onto their harvests in the hope of a rebound and better returns. The bet backfired badly for some
Nearly a year later, Polish farmer Artur Konarski still has about 150 tonnes of grain stuck in storage and he says some of his competitors in the European Union's third-biggest wheat producer have even bigger stocks of crops languishing in silos.
With a dearth of local produce in Poland, millers and livestock producers desperate for grain turned instead to a flood of imports from Ukraine ferried into the EU by trucks and trains, grain traders and farmers said. Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria quickly followed Poland's lead, sparking a row with Brussels over trade policy and demands for compensation for their angry farmers from EU funds.
European wheat prices hit post-harvest highs in October 2022 of more than 350 euros a tonne but since then prices have dropped to pre-invasion levels of about 235 euros. The EU restrictions on grain imports have also worsened an already bleak outlook for agriculture in Ukraine, which was the world's third-largest grain exporter before the war with Russia.
Since the conflict, began about 17 million tonnes of major agricultural products have left Ukraine by road, railways as well as barges on the Danube river, data issued by Ukraine's farm ministry shows. "Poland has been the most exposed because it had decent harvests itself. Hungary had such a bad maize harvest that it would have had to import maize, whether there was war in Ukraine or not," said Benoit Fayaud, an analyst with Strategie Grains.
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