Poland needs new specialised terminals for transhipment of Ukrainian grain, as existing storage capacity for large consignments is virtually exhausted, said Bartosz Penczkowski, owner and chairman of the board of the Polish logistics company Frontier Logistics.
“At present, if we look across Poland as a whole, it effectively has no capacity to store large volumes of cargo – 30,000 tonnes or more. All this capacity is effectively fully utilised,” he said during an online discussion entitled ‘Alternative export routes: Synergy between Ukrainian and Polish logistics in the context of the Black Sea blockade’.
According to him, in 2022–2023 Polish investors expanded the capacity of port and border terminals for transhipment of Ukrainian cargo, which, in theory, could have facilitated the export of 6–8 million tonnes of goods per year. However, following the resumption of operations at the ports of Greater Odessa in 2024–2025, some Ukrainian cargo returned to Black Sea ports, whilst Polish terminals shifted their focus to other cargo. In particular, Poland began receiving around 3–3.5 million tonnes of soya meal from Latin America and other goods.
According to him, another ‘bottleneck’ is access to specialised wagons for transporting grain.
Penchkovsky also noted that some border crossings have spare capacity, whilst others are overloaded.
He added that Poland’s logistics infrastructure has significant potential to increase the transhipment of Ukrainian agricultural produce, provided there is investment in specialised terminals and more efficient use of existing border crossings.