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Then he was told it wouldn\u2019t get shipped following a summer escalation in Russia\u2019s war with Ukraine.\n\n\n\n\u201cI was very panicked,\u201d 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. \u201cWe were too exposed to a crisis in the Black Sea.\u201d\n\n\n\nThe world\u2019s 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\u00a0economic damage by threatening to drive\u00a0inflation even higher while\u00a0undermining\u00a0food security in vulnerable countries. Bond investors say\u00a0food supply risks\u00a0aren\u2019t yet fully priced into a market\u00a0more focused on the cost of things like energy.\u00a0\n\n\n\nConnecting Europe and Asia, the Black Sea is a critical conduit for global crop shipments to some of the world\u2019s most populous nations. Russia and Ukraine make up more than a quarter\u00a0of the global wheat trade, a share similar to the\u00a0seaborne oil trade\u00a0passing through Hormuz in the Gulf.\n\n\n\nSupplies have been choked off since July when the countries stepped up attacks on each other\u2019s ports, pummeling grain terminals, silos and vessels.\u00a0The escalation also hit Russia\u2019s\u00a0energy infrastructure,\u00a0sending\u00a0diesel prices to records. A\u00a0key input into farming, the cost of the fuel is another inflationary risk for food.\u00a0\u00a0\n\n\n\nEgypt, the world\u2019s biggest wheat buyer, hasn\u2019t received any Black Sea grain in about a month.\u00a0Russia\u2019s 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.\n\n\n\nWheat prices have jumped to three-year highs, with few signs of a\u00a0repeat of the deal Turkey brokered in 2022 to create a shipping corridor for blocked\u00a0Ukrainian grains. Ukraine\u2019s western neighbors now\u00a0have import bans on its grain after a local political backlash against support for the war-ravaged country. \u00a0\u00a0\n\n\n\n\u201cWe can think of the Black Sea as important for global wheat trade as the Strait of Hormuz is for global oil trade,\u201d\u00a0said\u00a0Caitlin Welsh, a food security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. \u201cThe world is underestimating the impact of these attacks.\u201d\n\n\n\nCombined Russian and Ukrainian wheat exports are estimated to end up at roughly half what they were last year for the July to September harvesting period, based on figures from\u00a0researcher SovEcon.\n\n\n\nRussia and Ukraine also make up two-thirds of the\u00a0global sunflower oil trade\u00a0and a tenth of corn shipping. Their crops eventually filter through to anywhere from Egypt\u2019s bakeries and India\u2019s market stalls to Turkish flour mills\u00a0and\u00a0Vietnam\u2019s livestock and aquaculture industries.\n\n\n\nLocated just outside Ho\u00a0Chi Minh City, Golden Wheat mills grain for flour and imports feed for animals, part of a growing sector working to meet Southeast Asia\u2019s burgeoning food demand.\u00a0\n\n\n\nThe company was able to switch two boats to load Bulgarian wheat from Burgas, 500 kilometers (310 miles) down the coast from the Ukrainian port of Odesa. Vuong\u00a0stayed in constant touch with the sellers to ensure it was on its way.\u00a0\n\n\n\nHe also scoured the legal terms of his supply contracts and insurance premiums. He monitored news and the movement of vessels, anxious not just about their exit from the Black Sea but their transit through the Red Sea, which is under threat from Iran-backed Houthi rebels.\n\n\n\n\u201cAlthough the vessels were insured, if they\u00a0had been attacked, we would have faced shortages,\u201d he said.\u00a0To replace his two missing or stalled cargoes,\u00a0he\u00a0turned to the US, though\u00a0it came at a much higher price tag.\u00a0Since then, the prices have only gone higher.\n\n\n\nOther nations are trying to source grains from France, which loaded a first wheat shipment bound for Sudan in 18 years. Libya tapped the port of Rouen for the first time in more than a decade, according to data from local shipping agents.\n\n\n\nTurkey, the United Arab Emirates and others have\u00a0turned to the Baltic\u00a0states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Bangladesh is looking to growers like Romania and Argentina, while securing small quantities of wheat from India, which\u00a0recently scrapped\u00a0a years-long ban on exports.\u00a0Buyers are also approaching less obvious places for this time of the year, like Australia that\u2019s yet to collect this year\u2019s harvest.\n\n\n\n(Sign up to the\u00a0\u00a0newsletter for a weekly catchup on how the world feeds itself in a changing economy and climate.)\u00a0\n\n\n\n\u201cEvery day we\u2019re fielding inquiries from all over the world,\u201d said William Reid, wheat trading manager at CBH Group, one of Australia\u2019s top grain merchants. \u201cIt\u2019s been extraordinarily busy. We have to ration some demand because we can\u2019t literally continue to lose that volume of wheat.\u201d\n\n\n\nSupplies from other key breadbaskets are limited too. Droughts have curbed wheat and corn yields in the US and Europe\u2019s crop got hurt by this year\u2019s heat waves.\u00a0The crunch is expected to escalate this month, as countries chewing through reserves ramp up buying and Southern Hemisphere harvests have yet to start.\n\n\n\nThis time of the year coincides with the peak of the summer crop-export season and both Russian and Ukrainian governments are scrambling to secure exit routes for their crops. Circumventing the Black Sea is difficult because the capacity elsewhere is limited, underdeveloped or pricier.\u00a0\u00a0\n\n\n\nDuring a BRICS summit in India this month, Russian Agriculture Minister Oksana Lut tried to strike a reassuring tone, saying millions of tons of Russian grain were being shipped via Kazakhstan or the Baltic and Caspian seas. The country is also turning to the Far East to get grain out.\n\n\n\nBut that comes at a cost. While Russian volumes transiting Baltic countries surged, that\u2019s now prompting Latvia and Lithuania to\u00a0consider restrictions.\u00a0Using the Far East, meanwhile, adds thousands of miles of rail haul that\u2019s more expensive than ocean freight.\n\n\n\n\u201cThis is more painful and more frightening than a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is for the oil market,\u201d said Yevgeny Karabanov, the head of the analytical committee of the Grain Union of Kazakhstan, which imports Russian wheat overland. \u201cNo one can quickly ramp up grain production elsewhere enough to replace the lost volumes.\u201d\u00a0\n\n\n\nWheat trades on thin margins so the cost of\u00a0transportation\u00a0can make or break a deal.\u00a0To ease the impact, Russia plans to\u00a0pause\u00a0export duties on grains and is offering subsidies to encourage rail transport to alternative ports.\n\n\n\nBut even if alternative routes were to work, there is no escaping the Black Sea, which makes up more than 70% of Russia\u2019s grain exports.\u00a0And should a peace plan emerge, the infrastructure will take months, if not years, to repair. \u00a0\n\n\n\nArguably, Ukraine has\u00a0even a bigger problem. The ports around Odesa, which is under a regular barrage of Russian missiles and drones, usually handled about 90% of its grain exports.\n\n\n\nAgricultural shipments, meanwhile, generate more than half of the country\u2019s export revenue and its budget is already under strain. Ukraine\u2019s new prime minister\u00a0described the national finances\u00a0as \u201cclose to critical\u201d this month.\n\n\n\nThe new harvest is filling storage, depressing prices at home and leaving farmers facing hefty losses. Ukraine\u2019s grain storage capacity could be full by early November and some farmers have been resorting to plastic silo bags.\n\n\n\nKyiv is trying to expand shipments through Romania\u2019s Constanta port, though low Danube water levels are complicating those efforts and alternative routes \u2014 mainly along the coastlines of Romania and Bulgaria \u2014 are getting clogged, too.\n\n\n\nA backlog of roughly 80 \u2014\u00a0mostly smaller \u2014 vessels has built up around Ukraine\u2019s Danube ports as traffic is forced away from its major deep-sea terminals in the Black Sea, according to ship tracking data compiled by Kpler and Bloomberg.\n\n\n\nRoad and rail have emerged as important routes, but they are also showing problems.\u00a0With men needed on the front line, Ukrainian drivers may not be allowed to leave the country, while some of those who get permission to travel abroad may decide not to return.\n\n\n\nBulgarian trader Preslav Raykov faced delays when trucking Ukrainian sunflower seeds and oils into Bulgaria. \u201cAfter the truck crossed the border with Moldova or Romania, depending on the route, the driver just left the truck and ran away,\u201d Raykov said. \u201cThe drivers were fleeing, leaving the truck with cargo. The sellers were forced to find a substitute driver.\u201d\n\n\n\nUkraine also has more than a dozen\u00a0railway border crossings with neighboring EU countries, including Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, but those can\u2019t come close to fully replacing Odesa. Some 180 grain wagons can currently cross the border daily, equal to roughly 10,000 tons of grain. \u201cIt\u2019s just nothing,\u201d said Nikolay Gorbachov, head of the Ukrainian Grain Association, which represents the industry.\n\n\n\nThis time around, there\u2019s also less enthusiasm from Ukraine\u2019s western neighbors to help. Elections are due in Poland next year and Prime Minister Donald Tusk may think twice before easing any restrictions on grain imports. Even the issue of allowing them to cross Poland is sensitive, with Ukraine a key dividing line between the government and nationalist opposition.\u00a0\n\n\n\n\u201cTransit itself is as dangerous for Polish farmers as bringing the Ukrainian grains to the Polish market,\u201d said Michal Kolodziejczak, who led anti-Ukrainian farmer protests in 2023.\u00a0\n\n\n\nEven as the EU supports Ukraine\u2019s grain exports through alternative transit routes, there is no substitute for the volumes that can be moved by sea, said EU Foreign Affairs Chief Kaja Kallas. She warned of another \u201cworldwide food security shock.\u201d\u00a0\n\n\n\nFor now, food inflation is fairly subdued, though expected to start picking up by the end of the year. Supplies were already vulnerable because of soaring fertilizer and fuel costs triggered by the Iran war. A powerful El Ni\u00f1o is adding to the challenge. \u201cWe are facing several shocks at the same time,\u201d CSIS\u2019s\u00a0Welsh said.\u00a0\n\n\n\nWhen wildfires and droughts prompted Russia to ban wheat exports in 2010, it fueled food price spikes, a contributing factor in the Arab Spring.\n\n\n\nThis time, the dependence on Russian grain is even greater in Africa and the Middle East than back then. Many of the world\u2019s top buying nations have maintained subsidy programs to keep bread affordable and the low-cost Black Sea grain is a major source of supply.\u00a0\n\n\n\nRussia and Ukraine make\u00a0up about half of wheat imports to Egypt. Some two-thirds of households are entitled to subsidized bread and Egypt hasn\u2019t raised the prices since 2024. The collapse in supply from the Black Sea has sent flour prices soaring, according to Tarek Saeed Hassanein, head of the Grain Industry Chamber at the Federation of Egyptian Industries.\n\n\n\nThat\u2019s hitting bakers, who are already squeezed by high energy and labor costs and yet under pressure to keep prices of unsubsidized\u00a0bread stable. The cost of living has meant demand is low, according to Khalid Mohamed, who owns bakeries across Cairo.\n\n\n\n\u201cIt is difficult for the citizens,\u201d said Mohamed. \u201cPeople are struggling to put food on their plate.\u201d\n\n\n\nLuckily, Egypt had a good wheat harvest this year, reducing the need for imports. The government has enough stockpiles for\u00a0subsidized bread consumption to last until February, said Hassanein.\n\n\n\nAt a meeting with Putin, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi called for efforts to stabilize the situation to ensure uninterrupted supplies from Russia and Ukraine.\n\n\n\nTurkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was more explicit when meeting with Putin in Kyrgyzstan earlier this month.\u00a0\u201cWe need to resolve this problem because the damage it is causing is mounting,\u201d he said.\n\n\n\nTurkey, another major Russian wheat buyer, hopes to work toward another agreement similar to the\u00a0Black Sea Grain Initiative\u00a0for Ukrainian grain it helped broker in 2022. It\u2019s prepared a proposal and is in contact with both sides.\n\n\n\nWheat prices have been falling this month on hopes that a peaceful resolution will prompt a restart of shipments from the Black Sea. But the markets are downplaying the risks,\u00a0warned analysts at\u00a0Bloomberg Intelligence. Farmers in Russia and Ukraine are already planting wheat for next year\u2019s harvests and early indications show they\u2019re\u00a0curbing sowing, which\u00a0will\u00a0feed into 2027\u00a0grain supplies.\u00a0\u00a0\n\n\n\nDespite a new round of shuttle diplomacy between Moscow and Kyiv by US President Donald Trump\u2019s negotiators this month, both countries continue to launch devastating attacks.\n\n\n\nVuong in Vietnam has no illusions. He\u2019s\u00a0not counting on any peace plan in the near future. He doesn\u2019t expect wheat prices to return to normal until at least March, no matter what happens in the Black Sea.\u00a0\u00a0Although his company would bear some of the cost of the global disruptions, there was no avoiding price rises for staples such as flour.\u00a0\n\n\n\nHe was on\u00a0tenterhooks until earlier this month tracking the whereabouts of his Bulgarian grain, but is more relaxed now that he got the US wheat and the second Bulgarian vessel sailed through the Gulf of Aden. But the future of one cargo still hinges on what happens in the Black Sea. \u201cThe seller asked for a delivery extension to give them more time,\u201d he said, \u201cwaiting for some miracle to happen in Odesa.\u201d\u00a0\n\n\n\n\u00a9\u00a02026\u00a0Bloomberg L.P.\n\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t \n\n\n\t\tSubscribe for Daily Maritime Insights\n\t\tSign up for gCaptain\u2019s newsletter and never miss an update\n \u2014 trusted by our 107,437 members" ], "output": "readability", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790114669.470901", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-23T01:20:13.078630+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "screenshot": [], "singlefile": [], "title": [ { "cmd": [ "curl", "--silent", "--location", "--compressed", "--max-time", "120", "--user-agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) curl/curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "https://gcaptain.com/the-other-hormuz-black-sea-blockade-threatens-a-food-supply-shock/" ], "cmd_version": "curl 8.14.1 (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)", "end_ts": "2026-09-23T01:20:13.070704+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "The Other Hormuz: Black Sea Blockade Threatens a Food Supply Shock", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790114669.470901", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-23T01:20:13.039004+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ], "wget": [ { "cmd": [ "wget", "--no-verbose", "--adjust-extension", "--convert-links", "--force-directories", "--span-hosts", "--no-parent", "-e", "robots=off", "--reject=js,mjs,woff,woff2,ttf,otf,eot,mp4,m4v,mov,webm,ogv,mkv,avi,flv", "--timeout=120", "--restrict-file-names=windows", "--page-requisites", "--user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/118.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 ArchiveBox/0.7.4 (+https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/) wget/GNU Wget 1.21.3", "--compression=auto", "--timestamping", "https://gcaptain.com/the-other-hormuz-black-sea-blockade-threatens-a-food-supply-shock/" ], "cmd_version": "GNU Wget 1.21.3", "end_ts": "2026-09-23T01:20:13.029031+00:00", "index_texts": null, "output": "gcaptain.com/the-other-hormuz-black-sea-blockade-threatens-a-food-supply-shock/index.html", "pwd": "/data/archive/1790114669.470901", "schema": "ArchiveResult", "start_ts": "2026-09-23T01:19:57.995251+00:00", "status": "succeeded" } ] }, "icons": null, "is_archived": true, "is_static": false, "latest": { "archive_org": null, "dom": null, "favicon": "favicon.ico", "git": null, "media": null, "pdf": null, "screenshot": null, "singlefile": null, "title": "The Other Hormuz: Black Sea Blockade Threatens a Food Supply Shock", "warc": null, "wget": "gcaptain.com/the-other-hormuz-black-sea-blockade-threatens-a-food-supply-shock/index.html" }, "link_dir": "/data/archive/1790114669.470901", "newest_archive_date": "2026-09-23T01:20:15.138881+00:00", "num_failures": 0, "num_outputs": 6, "oldest_archive_date": "2026-09-23T01:19:56.921484+00:00", "path": "/the-other-hormuz-black-sea-blockade-threatens-a-food-supply-shock/", "schema": "Link", "scheme": "https", "snapshot_id": "a2fd6301-f551-4f49-a5d0-cb374104e032", "sources": [ "/data/sources/1790114669-import.txt" ], "tags": ",pool,war-wiki,escalation", "tags_str": "pool,war-wiki,escalation", "timestamp": "1790114669.470901", "title": "The Other Hormuz: Black Sea Blockade Threatens a Food Supply Shock", "updated": "2026-09-23T01:19:56.921298+00:00", "updated_date": "2026-09-23 01:19", "url": "https://gcaptain.com/the-other-hormuz-black-sea-blockade-threatens-a-food-supply-shock/" }