By KYIV. Dec 26 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Last Saturday and Sunday, the ports of Great Odesa shipped 390,000 tonnes of agricultural products as part of the Grain Initiative, the Infrastructure Ministry of Ukraine said.
"Over the past two days, nine ships have left the ports of Great Odesa, which will deliver 390,000 tonnes of agricultural products to African, Asian and European countries, including bulk carriers ALANDA STAR and SSI PRIVILEGE with 68,000 tonnes of wheat for Egypt and Indonesia, as well as the EUROCHAMPION tanker with 45,000 tonnes of vegetable oil for India," the ministry said.
The ministry said 24 ships are under processing in the ports involved in the "grain initiative." They load more than 860,000 tonnes of Ukrainian agricultural products.
‘Grain Corridor is also moving three ships to load 93,000 tons of agricultural products.
At the same time, in Bosporus, some 99 vessels are waiting for their turn to be inspected by the JCC, of which 72 are for entry into ports for loading, some 27 already with Ukrainian agricultural products.
"The goal of Russia is to slow down the process of ship inspections. First, they reduced the number of inspection teams to three, now they have begun to drag out the time of the inspections themselves. Russia’s representatives began to check even indicators that are not provided for by the documents of the JCC and have nothing to do with the subject of the inspection (for example, whether judicial units, how much fuel, etc.)," Deputy Minister for the Development of Communities, Territories and Infrastructure Yuriy Vaskov said.
According to him, with such an algorithm, checking one vessel takes from four hours, which leads to an increase in the queue and, at the same time, millions in damage to cargo owners due to downtime.
According to the Infrastructure Ministry, as of December 25, the third Inspection Team did not conduct any inspections, resulting in only six inspections out of ten scheduled for the day.
The department said for continuous movement of the grain corridor, at least 12 inspections per day should take place.
In general, since August 1, some 594 ships left the ports of Great Odesa, which exported 15.5 million tonnes of Ukrainian food to the countries of Asia, Europe and Africa.
