The Romanian Black Sea port of Constanta is trying to adjust to a growing influx of grain from Ukraine, diverted from its traditional export routes by the Russian invasion.

The pressure on Romanian infrastructures since Russia withdrew last month from the agreement that allowed Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea has increased in recent days in road transport, due to the shelling of Ukrainian river ports on the Danube.

“70% of the cereals reach us by barge on the river,” Dan Dolghin, director of Comvex, one of the companies that receives Ukrainian merchandise in this Romanian city to load on the boats, told AFP.

On July 17, Russia put an end to the international agreement signed under the auspices of the UN and Turkey that allowed the export by sea of ??33 million tons of Ukrainian cereals and grains.

Since then, Moscow has systematically attacked the nerve centers that still allow Ukraine to export its crops with a dropper.

The towns of Reni and Izmail, in the Odessa region bordering Romania, used to be the main outlet for Ukrainian agricultural products across the Danube and are now military targets for Russia.

To speed up exports, Romania’s railway capacities are gradually increasing, though not without difficulty, due to the difference in track gauge between the two countries.

“There are investments underway at the border to speed up the speed of passage of wagons,” reveals the Comvex manager.

His company has invested more than three million euros to cope with the change in the situation and increase the pace in the port, with Constanta becoming a bottleneck for exports of Ukrainian agricultural raw materials.

“Currently we can load 3,000 tons in an hour” on an outgoing ship, which is “two trainloads of goods,” calculates Dan Dolghin.

Comvex also plans to increase its storage capacity in the coming months by almost 50,000 tons to around 250,000 tons.

Corn, rapeseed, millet… the increasingly numerous materials arrive en masse by all possible routes, be it by boat on the Danube, by train or by road.

Since the beginning of the year, the main Romanian port has received 7.5 million tons of grains harvested by its neighbor, a large exporter, which is almost the same as in all of 2022 (8.7 million).

The port has thus become a nerve center in Europe for the export of this raw material.

But despite the efforts, this presents a challenge. The surrounding roads are saturated with trucks parked for several kilometers waiting to be cleared to unload.

In the waiting line, the vehicles of the Romanians alternate with those that transport Ukrainian cereals and grain. Not without tension: for hours, dozens of trucks remain stopped, without moving a meter.

Although traffic jams are frequent during the harvest period, the war has completely disrupted traffic, getting on the nerves of Romanian farmers and transporters.

“There isn’t even a bathroom here,” complains Ovidio, a Romanian driver who prefers not to give his last name. This trucker considers that the current situation is “abnormal” and “inhumane”.

Romania, with Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, managed to get the European Union to restrict imports of Ukrainian products until September, and they are pressing to extend the restriction. This has outraged Kiev, which fears it will end up with millions of tons of grain on its hands.

Caught between two fires, the Constanta port authorities want to launch an application at the end of the month that allows booking a discharge time.

But if ships stop coming down the Danube because of the Russian attacks, the situation could become complicated for everyone involved, both on the Ukrainian and Romanian sides.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project