Vucic: "At the moment Serbia has 800,000 tons of wheat"

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"We now want to avoid what happened to us on Monday. At this moment, we have 800,000 tons of wheat," the president of Serbia said today.

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He added that 75% is stored. "In one day, we had demand (to sell) a quarter of our total reserves, that never happened before, the prices have gone through the roof," he added.

"When the government aassesses that we are safe, then it can approve exports. But we have to measure every second," he stressed.

"In three days, our export of cooking oil jumped by 109%," Vucic pointed further out, adding that everything is monitored through various state bodies. "We have enough of everything, sugar, flour, cooking oil and corn, we have more than enough of everything."

Vucic said last night that starting from March 10, Serbia will ban export of flour, wheat, corn and cooking oil.

Regarding the situation with oil, the president said that a way will be sought to provide oil from several sources, but, he added, the problem is logistics now, because we were receiving a large portion of crude oil via Croatia.

Aleksandar Vucic and Peter Szijjarto / Photo: Tanjug/Strahinja Acimovic

"That was Russian oil, but it was arriving from Croatia. We must now reconsider the cost of transport via possible new sources."

Vucic also said that he "can't forgive himself for not buying oil six months ago, for not predicting what was happening, when the Chinese were buying on time."

"We are investing another 100 million euros to buy oil, the only question is where to keep it. We have expenses that we did not count on, such as excise taxes to keep fuel prices down. Regardless of the jump in the price of oil, this morning it is 132, 133 dollars per barrel, we are not touching the price. I don't know what to tell you if oil goes to $200 ... Having oil is not a problem, the problem is the price."

"This will not last 15, 20 days, but for months, this is hell. I hope it will not last militarily, but it will certainly last economically. We are better prepared than others," he added.

(Telegraf Biznis)