Two agricultural storage facilities in Ukraine owned by units of commodity trading giants Glencore and Bunge have been attacked by missiles on Wednesday. Citing officials of the two companies, Agence France Presse (AFP) and French newspaper Le Monde say the attacks took place at the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv. The Everi terminal facility, which is used to store and load vegetable oil, has been the target of a missile attack with two silos on fire and a third suffering damages, AFP said citing a spokesman of Viterra, a Glencore unit that bought the site in 2020. One person was slightly injured, according to the reports. The Everi port was built in 2010 with a capacity to store 160,000 tons and to load up to 1.5 million tons of vegetable oil per year for export destinations.

Bunge has seen damages as well. AFP cited a company spokesman as saying that facilities were impacted “by the latest Russian attacks in the region”. The exact extent of the damage, however, wasn’t known yet and nobody was injured. Bunge’s facilities in Mykolaiv have been shut down since Russia attacked Ukraine on 24 February. They include a storage and loading terminal as well as a vegetable oil production unit.

Ukraine is one of the world’s largest exporters for grains and vegetable oil. The country’s Black Sea ports have been blocked since the Russian invasion, stoking fears of worldwide food shortages, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. Negotiations between the warring and third parties over conditions to reopen the ports and unblock the ships trapped in them have been unsuccessful, so far.