Cutting off Ukraine from its most fertile land and major export center will have long-term consequences for world food exports, analysts say.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to rising food prices in March to the highest levels ever recorded, highlighting the global impact of its military offensive on the former Soviet granary.
As Moscow redirects its military efforts to eastern Ukraine, preparing huge forces for the second part of its offensive, analysts have warned that Russia’s takeover of Ukrainian ports and the most fertile land will have consequences for Ukraine’s food exports. Worldwide.
“There is not enough alternative to cover the gap,” said Roman Slaston, director of the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club (UCAB), adding that many countries around the world would be prone to starvation, hunger riots, refugee migration without food supplies to Ukraine.
The former Soviet nation was the world’s sixth-largest wheat exporter in 2021, with a 10 percent market share, according to the United Nations, and one of the world’s largest exporters of barley and sunflower seeds.
Every second to third piece of bread in Africa and the Middle East is made from Ukrainian wheat, according to the Global Hunger Index. Forty-seven countries had high levels of famine in 2021, and it is estimated that the war in Ukraine will bring that number to more than 60 in 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said Ukraine does not want to give up territory in the east of the country to end the war with Russia, and is preparing to put up serious resistance.
If it loses the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions, where Russia is advancing with the likely intention of securing a land bridge to the Crimean peninsula occupied in 2014, it will lose almost a quarter of its agricultural output, according to data collected by the ministry. of U.S. agriculture and compiled by Al Jazeera.
More importantly, analysts said, the loss of ports in the besieged south will make crop shortages and the subsequent rise in food prices a constant reality that the global food market will have to take into account.
No ports, no exports
Moscow said last week that it had taken over the strategic port city of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, a key export hub. He also took control of Kherson, a port city on the Black Sea and the Dnieper River, and devastated nearby Nikolaev.
Even in port cities spared the heaviest battles, such as Odessa, Russian warships in the Black Sea have intimidated merchant ships.
Slaston, whose NGO brings together more than 130 representatives of the agri-food sector, said farmers have turned to less efficient routes, including rail and road transport to the western border, but they allow much less exports.
“For example, sunflower seed exports have now fallen to 15-20 percent of prewar levels,” Slaston said. “These quantities are insufficient to supply the world market.”
A report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) describes the “immediate dimension of food security in this conflict” as access to food, not food availability.
FAO economist Monika Totova told Al Jazeera that 90 percent of exports went through ports in the Black and Azov Seas before the war.
“If Ukraine continues to be unable to export by sea, this will put additional pressure [global market] prices “, at least until other producers – including the European Union and India – can increase, she said.
The FAO Food Price Index rose 12.6 percent in March from February, when it had already reached its highest level since its inception in 1990. The Cereal Price Index was 17.1 percent higher. high in March as a result of the war, while the price of vegetable oil rose 23.2 percent, driven by higher quotations for sunflower oil.
If Russia takes over the breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, which together account for 8% of total agricultural production, the effect on food security will be limited, Totova said.
“But if it includes areas that are important for shipping in Black Sea ports, it will have a serious impact on world markets,” the economist added.
Changing agricultural landscape
Russia’s encroachment in the east, where most home-grown vegetables are grown, will inevitably change Ukraine’s agricultural landscape.
According to Totova, if vegetables are no longer available on the domestic market, farmers elsewhere in the country are obliged to fill the gap at the expense of crops that were previously destined for export.
That is, she added, if Ukrainian farmers have enough fuel to power tractors, plows, combines and delivery trucks, as most diesel fuel came to Ukraine via Belarus, which is part of the attack, and Russia itself.
Complicating the precarious situation, Slaston said Russia was making progress toward some of the world’s richest soils, known as “chernozems” or “chernozems.”
The rest of Ukraine is more dependent on fertilizers, an energy-intensive product of which Russia is a major exporter.
According to the Fertilizer Price Index, its price reached a record 128.1% year-on-year after Moscow’s invasion soared energy prices and put much of the world’s supply at risk.
UCAB predicts that this will affect the price of spring crops in Ukraine, including cereals such as barley and corn, as well as other crops such as sugar beets, sunflowers and soybeans.
“We hope these territories [in the east] “They are temporarily occupied and we will be able to restore it soon,” Slaston said.
“Unspoken awards from Putin’s invasion”
Some analysts say Ukraine’s valuable “black soil” may have been taken into account in the equation when Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to launch an invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
“There is a real fear among farmers that the soil is deprived of nutrients and not replaced, and here that Ukraine has one of the richest soils in the world, which is so fertile that it is listed as something of a global heritage.” Ian Overton, director of the London-based Action on Armed Violence research group, told Al Jazeera.
Studies show that climate change is already having a negative impact on agricultural production in Russia, especially for products such as grain, which are most dependent on weather and climate factors.
In 2010, Russia – one of the world’s top three exporters of wheat, corn, canola, sunflower seeds and sunflower oil – was forced to ban wheat exports altogether after a drought destroyed its crops. who had to pay significantly higher bread prices, with the most vulnerable groups being the hardest hit.
Meanwhile, the former Soviet granary was moving toward a historic land reform that pro-Russian voices in Ukraine vehemently opposed. In March 2020, the Ukrainian parliament lifted a moratorium preventing the sale of land but allowing long-term leases.
“Thanks to this historic decision, seven million Ukrainian landowners have been given the right to use their land at their discretion,” wrote Roman Leshchenko last year, who until last month was Ukraine’s agriculture minister in an opinion to the Atlantic Council. .
While foreigners were still excluded from property, there were plans for a national referendum.
According to the director of Action on Armed Violence, “nationalists who see this part of Ukraine as Russian – whether you agree with it or not – would be concerned about foreign national companies coming and renting land.”
Its military occupation could hamper further reforms, as well as provide some level of insurance against the kind of riots that ended centuries of tsarist rule in Russia and shook authoritarian regimes in the Arab world.
“I think this is one of the great unspoken rewards of Putin’s invasion,” Overton said.
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