Russia’s blockade of Ukrainian ports has already boosted world food prices and threatens to cause catastrophic food shortages in parts of the world, the UN has said. “For people around the world, war, along with other crises, threatens to unleash an unprecedented wave of hunger and misery, leaving social and economic chaos through,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday. Here’s what you need to know.
What happens?
The Russian invasion has affected the entire food production and supply chain of Ukraine: From sowing to harvest to export. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that between 20% and 30% of Ukraine’s agricultural land will remain either unplanted or unharvested this year due to the war. This is partly because large areas of Ukraine’s agricultural land – about half the area planted with winter wheat and about 40% of the area planted with rye – were under Russian occupation in March, interrupting the sowing season. But the war is also causing labor shortages, due to the huge number of people who have fled their homes or joined the volunteer units of the Ukrainian armed forces. International sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine have also had an impact on global supplies of fuel, fertilizers and products.
What about grains that have already been harvested?
Ukrainian authorities, and some international officials, have accused Russia of looting the country from grain and other goods in its occupied territories.
Dennis Martsuk, vice-president of the Ukrainian Agricultural Council of the Public Union, said in a statement on Wednesday that Russia had “stolen about 600,000 tonnes of grain” from Ukrainian farmers.
He said the grains were stolen from occupied areas of southern Ukraine and then transported to ports in the Russian-occupied territory of Crimea, specifically in Sevastopol, adding that they were then transported to the Middle East.
The Kremlin has denied the allegations, calling them “fake news.”
However, on Wednesday, the leader of the Moscow-backed military administration in the occupied part of southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region boasted of train wagons full of Ukrainian grain departing from the Russian-occupied city of Melitopol to Crimea.
Speaking to Solovyov live, an online video platform, Yevhen Balytskyi made it clear that the plan is to further increase these exports. “It can be predicted that in the near future these deliveries will increase hundreds of times,” he said.
Satellite images of the Crimean port of Sevastopol provided by Maxar Technologies last month showed Russian ships being loaded with Ukrainian grain. Another set of satellite imagery revealed that one of the ships arrived in the Syrian port of Latakia last month, its second voyage in four weeks. Under normal circumstances, Ukraine would export about three-quarters of the grain it produces. According to the European Commission, about 90% of these exports were transported by sea, through the Black Sea ports of Ukraine.
Russia is currently blocking maritime access to Ukrainian-owned Black Sea ports, which means that even grain that is still under Ukrainian control cannot be exported to the many countries that rely on it.
Ukraine has tried to boost its rail grain exports to make up for lost capacity, but this is proving to be a logistical challenge. For example, Ukrainian trains run on slightly wider lines than those in larger Europe, which means that wheat has to be moved from one set of wagons to another at the border.
Why is Russia doing this?
Allegations that Russia is using food as a weapon of war have been on the rise since the first reports surfaced in March of grain theft by Russian troops. European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen said on Wednesday that food had become part of the Kremlin’s “arsenal of terror”. “This is a cold, harsh and calculated siege by Putin on some of the most vulnerable countries and people in the world … food has become part of the Kremlin’s arsenal of terror and we can not tolerate it,” she said. der Layen. EU Members. The idea of using food shortages to ignite fear is particularly obscure in Ukraine because of its deep institutional memory of a deadly famine of 1932-1933. Known as the Holodomor, or Terrorist Hunger, it was artificially fabricated by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who stripped Ukrainian farmers of food supplies, killing millions. Under Ukrainian law, the Holodomor is considered an act of genocide, aimed at forcing Ukrainians into subjugation and thwarting efforts to build an independent Ukrainian state. The children learn it at school and the country stops to observe a minute’s silence on Holodomor’s annual Memorial Day. There are monuments all over the country and a large museum dedicated to Holodomor and its victims in Kyiv.
What does this mean for the world?
The crisis in Ukraine is having an impact around the world, because both Ukraine and Russia are major food exporters. World food prices have risen 17% since January, according to the FAO. Cereal prices are rising by more than 21%. The importance of Russia and Ukraine for world food supplies can not be underestimated. Nearly a third of world wheat exports and 60% of world sunflower oil exports came from both countries last year. Of every 100-calorie food sold worldwide, 12 come from Russia and Ukraine, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has warned that millions of people around the world could go on a hunger strike if Russia did not allow Ukraine to export grain from its ports. “We can not export our wheat, corn, vegetable oil and other products that have played a stabilizing role in the world market. This means that, unfortunately, dozens of countries may face a natural food shortage. Millions of people could starve if the blockade of Russia’s Black Sea continues, “he said in a recorded speech at the Time 100 Gala on Thursday. A new report by the FAO and the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) released this week warned that the war in Ukraine could push up to 47 million people into “acute food insecurity”, putting the total number of people at risk. risk of falling. in famine to 323 million. According to FAO data, some of the world’s most vulnerable countries are among those most dependent on imports from Ukraine. Lebanon, Tunisia, Somalia and Libya relied on Ukraine for at least half of their wheat imports. Eritrea supplied 47% of its wheat imports from Ukraine and the remaining 53% from Russia. The UN Program to Combat Food Insecurity buys about half of its wheat from Ukraine each year.
Is anything done?
International leaders are pulling diplomatic ropes as they try to push Moscow into an agreement that will unblock exports. UN officials have devised a plan to smuggle grain out of the Ukrainian port of Odessa across the Black Sea with Turkey acting as guarantor of the deal. Turkey has been open to trying to mediate an agreement with Russia, and Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoλουlu met with Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov in Ankara on Wednesday to discuss the issue. Although no agreement emerged from the talks, Tsavousoglu said “there could be new ground for negotiations” between Ukraine and Russia. He said there were “many ideas” on how to set up an open corridor for grain exports from Ukraine and that a UN plan was “reasonable and feasible”, but called for more talks. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peshkov said on Thursday that an agreement had not yet been reached on exports of Ukrainian grain to Turkey or the Middle East, but that work was under way. The Kremlin had previously denied allegations that Russia was blocking grain exports from Ukraine, and instead blamed the West and Kyiv. Separately, the US is working to introduce temporary storage containers for Ukrainian cereals in the country, a measure of suspension as they seek to mitigate the crisis. CNN’s Mick Krever, Olga Voitovych, Tim Lister, Niamh Kennedy, Benjamin Brown, Radina Gigova, Anna Chernova, Kylie Atwood, Jennifer Hansler, Alex Marquardt and Jeremy Herb contributed to the report.
