Transportation of grains and oilseeds from Ukraine to Poland by rail in 2022 increased by 27 times compared to 2021, Rafal Weber, state secretary of Polish Ministry of Infrastructure, said at the International Conference on Transport Development at European level without specifying the absolute figure.
At the same time, Mustafa Nayem, head of Ukraine’s State Agency for Infrastructure Rehabilitation and Development, who attended the conference, noted that new logistics routes may have emerged over that period.
“The activity of Central European countries was decisive in the first weeks and months of the war, so that new logistic routes could have appeared,” his words were quoted by the press service of the Polish ministry on the website of the department.
Nayem stressed that the situation with the growth of traffic requires mobilization from the Polish side and further integration of transport systems of Ukraine and the EU.
Further intensification of trade flows puts Poland before the need to increase the transshipment capacity of port infrastructure, the capacity of which until recently has been a deterrent to the growth of grain shipments from Ukraine, the conference participants noted.
“Ports have to be too big to handle growing cargo flows. The Port of Gdansk is currently reaching its maximum transshipment capacity. We have to anticipate what will happen and prepare more berths,” Lukasz Greinke, director of the Port of Gdańsk, said at the conference.
Last year Poland’s largest seaports, Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin-Swinoujscie, handled a total of more than 133 million tons of cargo, a record, said Grzegorz Witkowski, deputy minister of infrastructure of the Republic of Poland.
He stressed that the Polish government will continue to implement ambitious projects in Polish ports, so that they can meet the challenges associated with the inclusion of the transport corridor “Baltic Sea – Black Sea – Aegean Sea” in the main Trans-European transport network TEN-T.
