Thorsten Tiedemann is doing his best to alleviate the terrible consequences of the war in Ukraine, Europe's breadbasket, for feeding the world's population.

However, the managing director of the Hamburg agricultural trading company Getreide AG did not travel to Odessa or Mariupol on the Black Sea to somehow export Ukrainian grain, which has been stuck there in large quantities in warehouses for months, despite the warships and sea mines.

But to the other side of the globe, to Australia.

Sebastian Balzter

Editor in the economy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Tiedemann buys rapeseed from Australian farmers and they have had a good harvest.

Rapeseed meal is a great animal feed.

This can be used to replace maize or wheat in livestock farming.

The same applies to soya, which Tiedemann and other European agricultural traders are currently buying in Brazil and Canada, where good yields are now being recorded after a drought last year.

Wheat price back to pre-war level for the first time

That doesn't sound spectacular.

But these changed flows of goods are among the reasons for a remarkable development on the world agricultural market.

The price of wheat, which rose so steeply after the Russian attack on Ukraine because of the feared total loss of exports that famine of catastrophic proportions in the poor countries of the world seemed inevitable, recently fell back to the pre-war level for the first time (

see grafic

).

The wheat harvest in other parts of the world did not even have to be particularly plentiful for this to happen.

The agricultural traders did not wait for the preliminary agreement that Russia and Ukraine negotiated last week in the grain war.

Nor are they concerned now that only a short time later Russian missiles hit port facilities in Odessa.

Thorsten Tiedemann buys rapeseed from Australia instead of wheat from the Ukraine.

The demand for wheat on the world market is already falling.

However, such international replacement transactions do not fully explain the drop in prices.

Developments in Ukraine also play an important role in this.

As bad as the war is, agriculture has not come to a standstill.

Winter grain was already sown on most of the fields last autumn and is now ripe.

In the east of the country, the harvest is failing in many places due to hostilities.

In the west and north, where the war was still raging in the spring when the young plants began to grow, there are currently hardly any restrictions.

The agricultural group IMC Agro has its fields there, totaling 120,000 hectares, a huge area by German standards.

Managing Director Alex Lissitsa reports: “Of our 2,000 employees, around 200 fled abroad after the war began.

Almost all of them have since returned.” But what to do with the new harvest?

The sea route, the standard route for food exports from Ukraine, is blocked.

A large part of the harvest from last year is therefore still in the silo.

“We repaired a big old warehouse that we originally wanted to sell,” says Lissitsa.

"We also bought silo bags, enough for around 100,000 tons of grain." Whether the storage capacity is large enough now depends on the yield.

And how long the ports on the Black Sea will be closed.