December 3 2003, 15:16 Interfax-Ukraine

Railway department complains of delays with unloading of import grain

According to Vitaly Oliynyk - a top official from Ukraine's railway department (Ukrzaliznytsia) - a huge number of cars with wheat, brought form Russia and Kazakhstan, has been accumulated at the railway stations of Ukraine. Grain traders do not manage to unload them on time.

"The cars are demurred at cross-border entrance points of Ukraine in expectation of customs clearance operations from 10 hours up to 3 days", Oliynyk said. He said this was caused by the situation, when "having bought the grain in Russia and Kazakhstan, the traders direct the cars to Ukraine, having not solved the issue of its sale".

Another reason, he said, was technological inability of Ukrainian elevators to accept large amounts of import grain in a short time, as Ukrainian elevators were usually not suited for acceptance of grain from the railcars. That is why the unloading itself usually takes 3 to 10 days.

"On the average, we unload 390 cars per day of solely wheat, of which 320 are foreign cars. At the same time, as many as 986 cars per day on average remain unloaded, of which 896 cars are foreign", he said.

He said that while in April and May the railway department had been receiving 2,000 to 3,000 cars with grain per month on average, in October and November this figure increased to 10,000 to 11,000 cars. It is expected that in December the carflow with import grain will increase still more.

He noted that the current situation with demurrages of foreign cars was bringing losses to the department, as demurrage of each foreign cars costs 11.06 Swiss Francs per day.

As of December 1 the railway transport brought to Ukraine [since the start of year] over 2.5 million tonnes of wheat, including over 1.1 million tonnes from Russia and 1.3 million tonnes from Kazakhstan, said the railway official.