OVIEDO, Spain

A port in northwestern Spain received its first shipment of Ukrainian corn on Monday via a new shipping route that avoids the Russian blockade in the Black Sea.

The 18,000 tons of corn traveled from Ukraine by truck across the borders of Poland and Romania to the Polish port of Swinoujscie.

On May 27, it was loaded into a cargo ship that traveled through the Baltic Sea, stopped at two German ports and then sailed south through the Atlantic to reach the city of A Coruna in the Spanish region of Galicia.

The corn was purchased by Agafac, a Galician regional animal feed producer.

However, Agafac Director Bruno Beade compared the shipment to “a grain of sand on the beach” since Galicia goes through 95,000 tons every month.

“In the first half of the year, we usually bring in grain from Ukraine, but it was totally cut off by the war and we had to bring it from Canada, Romania and even some from France,” he told the Spanish news agency EFE. “It’s been enough to get to this point, and now it’s the season to start importing from southern hemisphere countries like Brazil.”

While he said he never grappled with a supply shortage, he complained that the prices of materials for animal feed have gone through the roof.

“Farmers are already dealing with high energy prices, fertilizer prices and now animal feed prices as well,” he explained. “Producing one liter of milk or one kilo of meat costs twice as much today as it did a year and a half ago.”