KYIV: High energy costs and a delayed harvest is making Ukrainian corn too expensive to export successfully in early 2022, a trader said on Monday.

“You can see a big picture, which shows that at current prices after the New Year, we have nowhere to sell corn,” Tymur Shyshlov from Risoil Ukraine told the APK-Inform agriculture consultancy.

He said that either Ukrainian physical prices must fall or world price trends must rise.

Ukraine plans to harvest a record 40 million tonnes of corn this year and more than 30 million tonnes of which could be exported.

Ukraine exported 23 million tonnes of corn in the 2020-21 season from its 2020 harvest of 30.3 million tonnes.

But traders and analysts say soaring global gas prices and a subsequent rise in domestic prices has increased the net cost of Ukrainian corn, forcing farmers to delay harvesting in the hope crops will lose their additional humidity by staying on fields.

?orn after harvesting must be dried for its subsequent long-term storage in silos.

Shyshlov said a jump in logistics costs and record high corn harvest in South America were additional factors which could affect Ukrainian corn exports.

APK-Inform said this weekend Ukrainian corn export bid prices decreased by $1 a tonne over the past week to $279 to $288 FOB Black Sea.

Ukraine has exported 5.5 million tonnes of corn so far this season, almost the same volume as at the same date in 2020, the agriculture ministry’s data showed.