Grain is shipped in large specialized dry bulk cargo ships. It’s a lot closer to ship from Ukraine to, say, Egypt than to ship from Australia or Canada or even India. If you ship your grain N times farther, you need N times as many ships to make the same number of trips. Those ships don’t exist or can’t be mustered on short notice, so you have to use some other kind of (less-specialized, less efficient and more expensive) shipping.

Even if you can manage to get all of the grain where it needs to go on new routes, the price of grain is going to go up substantially in places previously importing from Russia/Ukraine, and the logistical changes will cause second-order disruptions to other global shipping.

If anyone else is wondering, the largest ships carry 300,000 DTW, which is 300,000,000 kg each of which has 3400 kCal. Daily caloric intake of 2,000 may be suitable average, meaning that one ship can supply all energy needs for 1.5 million people and one year.

(3700 * 300000 * 1000) / (365 * 2000)

Keep in mind that grains are not only used for human consumption though. It's also used for animals. Egypt has 10M cattle alone [1] and a 1,000lb animal needs roughly 7x the calories as a person. [2] So that same largest cargo ship will only feed about ~200,000 cattle, requiring 50 such ships to feed the cattle population.

They produce about 1.8 billion heads of poultry [3], and in total only about 1/3 of their animal feed requirements are produced domestically [1].

Animal feed appears to be in a different category from other grain imports for human consumption, probably because it really is a separate product containing a mixture of grains and nutrients from other sources. Unfortunately though, much of it is also imported from Ukraine [4] which has banned all exports of grains for now, and it's probably a reasonable assumption that this will include grains used in animal feed, since the issue is the food security of their own people.

Eqypt is going to need a lot more newly-sourced grains or grain-based products, a large # of container ships full of it.

[1] https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/api/Report/DownloadRepo...

[2] https://cals.arizona.edu/forageandgrain/sites/cals.arizona.e...

[3] https://crimsonpublishers.com/cras/pdf/CRAS.000502.pdf

[4] https://www.feednavigator.com/Article/2016/09/19/USDA-Egypti...

I mean, that is just an advertisement to reduce meat production and focus on starch based calories for humans rather than supplying to inefficient meat production.

I was thinking much the same as I wrote it, but didn't want to overburden an already long comment. Here though, I'll say that large cattle consume about 30 calories for each single calorie their meat will provide. Poultry seem more like 10 to 1.

I'll own up to some level of hypocrisy on this as I am not a vegetarian, but I also won't complain much if further population growth makes meat consumption unsustainable when it means people starve. (I don't think we're there yet: world hunger right now seems to be more about other factors, economical and otherwise. I'm open to opposing viewpoints on it though)

While the largest bulk carrier ships can indeed carry 300,000 tons of cargo, these ships are usually used to transport iron ore or other ores. It is very rare that wheat is transported on ships that carry more than 70,000 tons. The main reason is that neither origin or destination port logistics allow for larger shipments, and most buyers cannot store such large quantities of wheat.

It seems that ships need to be specifically fitted out for something like grain transport as well. I'm sure there can be some reworking of things but it's bound to take time and resources and further boost cargo prices, and slow down on/offloading at ports and create additional bottlenecks.

I'm tentatively optimistic that this situation isn't going to mean mass famines, but there will be a significant monetary cost and likely some human cost as well.

> If you ship your grain N times farther, you need N times as many ships to make the same number of trips.

Which would be really bad if it was a global increase, but when it's a tiny sliver of the market you only need a sliver of spare capacity.

>you only need a sliver of spare capacity

If there was spare capacity, but there doesn't seem to be much at all. 1 in 10 inter-country wheat shipments will be Ukrainian, and it's about 1 in 7 for corn, probably other crops as well. Repurposing that shipping capacity isn't easy either, from a logistics standpoint. It can take up to a month just for a ship to cross the Pacific, before any other route complexities. It doesn't help that there's over 100 such cargo ships tied up in Ukrainian ports either, a decent proportion of which will be the subset of cargo ships fitted out for bulk grain transport.

The last few years have already shown us how delicate the global logistics & supply chains are. It doesn't take much to stretch them near to the breaking point, and we're already close to that point.

Most world grain is shipped short distances within countries (by rail, truck, canal, ..) and consumed locally. Only a small proportion is shipped internationally, and usually the shortest possible routes are picked (because that is cheaper).

Entirely taking out Ukrainian grain shipments is not a small sliver of the total amount of long-distance grain shipping, but instead requires a significant increase in the total deadweight-ton-miles. We are talking about taking 10%+ of international wheat/corn/barley trade and making it travel 3–6x further than it otherwise would, in an industry that usually runs on thin capacity margins. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert and have not done a detailed calculation.)

That is a potential logistical nightmare. Hopefully smart people with the power to make large temporary changes are working on ameliorating the pain and keeping everyone fed.

Thanks for the added detail-- I wasn't aware of details specific to the Ukraine <-> Egypt supply chain, and this demonstrates extremely well the difficulties of shifting supply sources.