By Pavel Polityuk
KYIV (Reuters) -The 2025 harvest of Ukraine’s key commodities, wheat and corn, may be higher than expected if weather conditions are favourable, while stable export demand will encourage farmers to expand winter wheat sowings for the 2026 crop, a senior official said on Monday.
Ukraine is a major global grain grower and exporter but its harvest fell sharply after Kyiv lost around a fifth of its territory due to the Russian invasion in 2022.
Taras Vysotskiy, deputy economy minister, told Reuters in an interview that the 2025 wheat output forecast may be raised to 22 million tons from the current 21.2 million tons and to 28 million tons from 26.5 million tons for corn.
The overall harvest could repeat the result of 2024, when 56 million tons of grain was threshed, with 22.7 million tons of wheat and 26 million tons of corn.
In 2021, before the Russian invasion, Ukraine harvested 84 million tons of grain. It included 32 million tons of wheat and almost 42 million tons of corn.
“Previously, the forecast was 26.5 million tons of corn for 2025, but there is potential for growth – optimistically speaking, we could see 28 million tons, provided there are no serious unforeseen circumstances,” he told Reuters.
The deputy minister said a higher output would allow the export of up to 40 million tons of various grains in the 2025/26 July-June season.
He said that the export could include 15 to 16 million tons of wheat but some of the volume would be redirected as the European Union has imposed limits on wheat imports from Ukraine to address the concerns of its own farmers.
The move cut imports to 1 million tons from 4 million which Ukraine supplied to the EU.
“These three million tonnes (which Ukraine previously supplied to the EU) are not critical in terms of redirection to other markets,” he said.
In addition to the EU, Ukraine traditionally supplies wheat to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Vysotskiy said that the area under winter wheat, Ukraine’s key grain crop, may rise by 6.4% to 5 million hectares in 2026 thanks to high external demand and an expected reduction in the area under soybeans.
Winter wheat accounts for more than 95% of the total wheat harvest in Ukraine, which exports almost two-thirds of its output and before the war ranked fifth among wheat exporters.
“Considering that wheat prices are currently good for both food and feed, 5 million hectares of sown area is possible,” Taras Vysotskiy, deputy economy minister, said in the first official forecast for the 2025/26 winter wheat sowing area.
Ukrainian wheat export prices traditionally fall during the mass harvest, but according to the largest Ukrainian farmers’ union UAC, prices have remained stable this season, fluctuating around $222-$227 per ton carriage paid to (CPT), supported by demand.
UAC said last week that 3.45 million tons of Ukrainian wheat were contracted for exports in July-August.
(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
