On Thursday 12 May, the European Commission unveiled its action plan to create ‘solidarity lanes’ to enable Ukraine - in the context of war - to export its grain and import the goods it needs, ranging from humanitarian aid to animal feed and fertiliser.
“Twenty million tonnes of grain are due to leave Ukraine in less than 3 months, using the EU’s transport infrastructure. This is a huge challenge. It is therefore essential to coordinate and optimise logistics chains, to develop new routes and to avoid bottlenecks as much as possible”, commented Transport Commissioner Adina Vălean.
In concrete terms, the European Commission intends first of all to invite the transport sector to increase the means of transport available, in order to better match supply with demand and needs. At present, several thousand railcars and trucks are awaiting clearance on the Ukrainian side, and the average waiting time for railcars is 16 days. This can take up to 30 days at some borders, the European Commission says.
In order to achieve this objective of increasing the available resources, the European Commission announced that it would set up a logistical platform for interconnection and that the Member States should establish one-stop shops for the solidarity lanes.
In addition, the European Commission also calls on the industry to transfer mobile grain shippers to border terminals in order to speed up transhipment and avoid bottlenecks.
The issue of transhipment is a major difficulty in this dossier, due to the different rail gauges between Ukrainian and European infrastructure. The majority of Ukrainian wagons cannot run on the European network, so goods have to be transhipped onto trucks or other wagons, while border transhipment facilities are rare.
In addition, the European Commission also calls on national authorities to be flexible when carrying out border controls and to provide sufficient staff.
Finally, the European Commission will carry out an assessment to analyse the existing capacities for the storage of goods.
Beyond the emergency measures, the European Commission also plans to carry out longer-term work to develop connections between Ukraine and the EU.
These new connections could be part of the reconstruction of Ukraine or the next round of calls for proposals under the Connecting Europe Facility. This will, the European Commission adds, support projects to improve rail links to Ukraine and road-rail terminals.
In this regard, the European Commission also adopted on Thursday 12 May a decision to sign a high-level agreement with Ukraine updating the maps of the trans-European transport network (TEN-T).
See the document: https://aeur.eu/f/1lm (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)