The Romanian port of Constanta has started using a floating crane to transship crops arriving by barge from Ukraine along the Danube River.
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The crops are loaded on merchant ships to bring them to third countries.
It will no longer be necessary to load the grain into port storage facilities and will help increase the amount of cargo handled by the port, Ukrainian media outlets said with the reference to the website of Bulgaria's Maritime.bg.
"Transport Trade Services (TTS) has launched a new comprehensive logistic project to significantly increase the flow of Ukrainian cargo transported from the river ports of Reni and Ismail and loaded on merchant ships in the Constanta port," the website said.
The floating crane will be transshipping Ukrainian grain in the deep-water part of the Constanta port directly from river barges to merchant ships, it said.
The first ship loaded consistent with the new logistic model is MV Lausanne, flying the flag of Sierra Leone that took aboard 31,000 tonnes of Ukrainian grain, it said.
As reported earlier, congestion of logistics routes in the Sulina Canal (Romania) makes Ukrainian agricultural exporters wait for bulkers to be loaded for ten days or more, which causes daily losses of $500,000.
Ukrainian Agrarian Policy Minister Mykola Solsky said earlier that the logistics might become more complicated and the transportation of Ukrainian agricultural products to Romania might slow down as early as in June as the shipments of winter wheat and barley start arriving in Romanian seaports from Romania, Serbia, Hungary, and Bulgaria as competitors of the Ukrainian grain. ■
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