USAID provides Ukraine's Nibulon with weighing equipment for four elevators
MOSCOW. July 19 (Interfax) - The Ukraine Economic Support project of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) acquired equipment to weigh trains and trucks and handed it over to Nikolayev-based JV Nibulon, one of Ukraine's largest grain market operators, Ukrainian media said, citing the grain trader's press service.
"The delivery of state-of-the-art weighing equipment to Nibulon's elevators will help speed up the process of weighing trucks and trains, will ensure automation and will help reinstate capacities that were earlier taken out of service and redirect them to the Izmail investment project. We hope that this will allow us to restore the capacity of the delivery chains and expedite the operations to receive and ship grain products. The additional weighing equipment will boost the trade turnover in conditions of the increased load on land transport," Nibulon's director for liaison with government agencies and sustainable development Mikhail Rizak said.
The weighing equipment will be used at four of Nibulon's elevators - in the Nikolayev, Poltava and Cherkassy regions, the company said.
Since the start of the crisis, Nibulon had to reorient its export chains and compensate for the absence of river navigation on the E-40 international inland waterway. An investment project aimed at developing the Izmail river port and efforts to strengthen Nibulon's logistics potential by using overland routes became the company's priorities, it said.
Presently, Nibulon uses routes that combine transportation by trucks and transferring cargoes to trains and then to water transport in Izmail.
USAID's assistance to agricultural exporters is part of the agency's Agriculture Resilience Initiative for Ukraine. The initiative aims to enhance Ukraine's potential in terms of production, storage, transportation and export of grain.
JV Nibulon was established in 1991. Before the crisis, the company had 27 transshipment terminals and complexes for receiving agricultural crops, capacities for the simultaneous storage of 2.25 million tonnes of agricultural products, a fleet of 83 ships, including 23 tugboats, and owned the Nikolaev shipbuilding plant.
It cultivated 82,000 hectares of land in 12 regions of Ukraine and exported agricultural products to more than 70 countries.
In 2021, the grain trader exported the biggest ever amount of agricultural products - 5.64 million tonnes, reporting record-large deliveries to external markets in August that year - 0.7 million tonnes, 1.88 million tonnes in the fourth quarter of the year, and 3.71 million tonnes in the second half of 2021.
The company is currently operating at 30% of its capacity. The grain trader recently received 27 million euros from Denmark's Export Investment Fund to boost the capacity of the Bessarabsky branch in Izmail, where an elevator and a milling factory will be built.