U.S. President Joe Biden stated that they would build temporary silos along the border with Ukraine to help export more grain and overcome the growing global food crisis.
“I’m working closely with our European partners to get 20 million tons of grain locked in Ukraine out onto the market to help bring down food prices,” Biden told a Philadelphia union convention on Tuesday. “It can’t get out through the Black Sea because it’ll get blown out of the water.”
Moreover, Biden affirmed that Washington was developing a plan to get grain out by rail but the Ukrainian track gauges were different from those in Europe, so the grain has to be transferred to different trains at the border.
“So we’re going to build silos, temporary silos, on the borders of Ukraine, including in Poland,” he said.
Biden highlighted that grain could be transferred from Ukrainian railway cars into the new silos, and then onto European freight cars to “get it out to the ocean and get it across the world.”
“This is just one of the possibly useful steps in ensuring food security. But we also need a green corridor for our ports,” Andriy Yermak, chief of staff to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said in an online post.
In the same vein, Ukraine’s agriculture ministry indicated that the European countries were considering providing temporary silos to “preserve the harvest and secure future grain supplies”.
Ukraine pointed out that the best way to get grain exports moving again is through Black Sea shipments.
Meanwhile, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is trying to broker what he calls a “package deal” to resume Ukrainian Black Sea exports and Russian food and fertilizer exports, which Moscow says had been hit by sanctions. The U.N. has so far described talks with Russia as “constructive.”
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