Drone attacks at sea have cut off Ukraine's wheat to Indonesia

Nikkei Asia, reporting from Izmail in Ukraine and from Jakarta, says constant drone attacks on merchant ships in the Black Sea are now hitting Ukrainian grain shipments to Asia. Indonesian buyers say wheat supplies have almost stopped since the middle of the year, and prices have risen sharply. Buyers in Bangladesh report the same thing. The danger to the ships is real: one vessel, the Royad Mammadov, sank on 5 October after an attack just outside Romania's territorial waters, and two people on board were killed.

The way around the danger costs money. Exporters are moving grain through the inland Danube route, pushing cargo up the river instead of loading it at the deep-sea ports on the Black Sea coast. Nikkei says that route pushes up both freight, the price of moving goods, and the time the journey takes. A shipping war a continent away ends up as a line on a flour invoice in Jakarta. Wheat is the base of bread, biscuits and instant noodles, and Indonesia buys it from abroad, so when one big supplier drops out the mills have to bid for cargoes from somewhere else.

Nobody in the story is deciding to charge Indonesians more. The price moves because the ships that used to carry the grain are now targets, and the safer path to market is the slower one.

Why it matters

If you run a warung, a bakery or any small food business that buys flour, this is the kind of cost rise that arrives without an announcement and without a policy to blame. Watch the flour price rather than the headlines about Ukraine, because the gap between an attack at sea and a new price at the mill is a matter of weeks. For households, it lands where it always lands first: the cheapest filling food on the shelf gets a little less cheap.