Ukrainian Customs Service have blocked in ports 24 vessels with 379,647 tonnes of grain, mostly wheat, for exports without explanation, traders' union UZA said on Tuesday.
"According to the latest data, about 20 ships are staying in ports without official explanations. Some of the ships are staying in ports for more than one and half months," UZA said in a statement.
UZA said 17 ships were staying in the Black Sea ports of Mykolayiv, Kherson, Odessa, Sevastopol, Ochakov and Yuzhny. Seven other ships are in the Azov sea ports of Brdyansk and Mariupol.
In late August traders said Ukraine’s Customs Service had almost completely stopped grain exports from the former Soviet republic and strengthened its recently imposed additional grain quality checks.
In August deputy head of Ukraine’s customs service Serhiy Semka told Reuters the service would keep up quality checks on all Ukrainian wheat export shipments, in spite of unhappiness among traders, and might extend them to other cereals.
But he said the checks should not take more than five days and the customs would not create any artificial bans on exports.
"We are not against additional checks, but we ask (the customs) to carry these checks within one day but not during the current 10-20 days," UZA said.
One of the world’s top wheat exporter, Ukraine exported 653,191 tonnes of wheat in the first two months of the new 2010/11 season compared to 1.79 million tonnes in the same period in 2009/10 because of export curbs.
The wheat harvest could fall to about 17 million tonnes in 2010 from 20.9 million in 2009 after severe frosts in winter and a prolonged heatwave in July and August.
Ukraine consumes about 12 million tonnes of wheat per season and analysts say it is able to export about 6 million of tonnes of wheat in 2010/11.
