Russian grain still flows to top customers despite war inflating costs

Russian grain still flows to top customers despite war inflating costs

Bloomberg / Moscow

Seven weeks after its invasion of Ukraine, Russia is still exporting grain to some of its biggest customers, even as shipping costs soar.

The main buyers remain Egypt, Turkey and Iran, said Dmitry Rylko, general director of the Moscow-based Institute for Agricultural Market Studies. The resilience of grain exports, despite sanctions and moves by some traders to shun Russian commodities, is pushing some market observers to raise their estimates for shipments this season.

Almost 900,000 tonnes of wheat have been loaded in Russian ports so far this month, in line with the pace in March, according to Logistics OS. Crop data from AgFlow also show Russian exports of key agricultural commodities, including wheat, fell just shy of 1mn tonnes in the first 13 days of April, close to level in the same period in March.

Those shipments have spurred analysts like Strategie Grains to downgrade their outlook for wheat exports from the European Union, one of Russia’s biggest competitors. The US Department of Agriculture last week also raised its estimate for Russian wheat exports in the current season to 33mn tonnes, though that remains short of the 35mn tonnes it forecast before the war.

Under Russian quotas, exports from