Tue Vuong had secured four cargoes of wheat harvested from fertile lands around the Black Sea, roughly a fifth of what his milling company 5,000 miles away in Vietnam uses annually. Then he was told it wouldn’t get shipped following a summer escalation in Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“I was very panicked,” said Vuong, chief executive officer of Golden Wheat in Ho Chi Minh City. He was offered replacements for two of his cargoes with wheat from Bulgaria, but with a gap in his supplies, he spent weeks frantically searching for more. “We were too exposed to a crisis in the Black Sea.”
The world’s attention has been on the Strait of Hormuz and spiking oil prices because of the conflict in the Middle East. But the impasse in the Black Sea is compounding the economic damage by threatening to drive inflation even higher while undermining food security in vulnerable countries. Bond investors say food supply risks aren’t yet fully priced into a market more focused on the cost of things like energy.
Connecting Europe and Asia, the Black Sea is a critical conduit for global crop shipments to some of the world’s most populous nations. Russia and Ukraine make up more than a quarter of the global wheat trade, a share similar to the seaborne oil trade passing through Hormuz in the Gulf.
Supplies have been choked off since July when the countries stepped up attacks on each other’s ports, pummeling grain terminals, silos and vessels. The escalation also hit Russia’s energy infrastructure, sending diesel prices to records. A key input into farming, the cost of the fuel is another inflationary risk for food.
Egypt, the world’s biggest wheat buyer, hasn’t received any Black Sea grain in about a month. Russia’s exports are throttled by Ukrainian drones, while Ukraine, with its ports blocked, is struggling to get its grain out by land or river. As harvests pile up, the country is also struggling to find enough storage.
