The next fear from the Ukraine war: A global food crisis
CBC
The world's breadbasket is cracking. Ukrainian land is being shattered by bombs, its sea ports disrupted by blockades, and its working-age population increasingly focused on burying enemy soldiers instead of seeds.
The ripple effects of this will hit the world's poor the hardest, with high wheat-importing regions like North Africa especially vulnerable.
Food prices were already high. Now, two countries that produce more than one-quarter of the world's wheat are at war, and one crisis is compounding another.
With Ukraine under attack, Russia sanctioned, energy prices soaring and inflation blowing up the cost of other commodities, it's a metastasizing series of price shocks — and food policy analysts warn the worst is still ahead.
"It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of our concerns," said Caitlin Welsh, director of the global food security program at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Ukraine's deputy minister of agriculture policy says even in normal times a small supply disruption might have a global ripple effect.
Imagine now, Taras Dozba says.
The government has surveyed Ukraine's farmers and the numbers are bleak, according to Dozba: just 20 per cent say they have the fuel they need to run their farms, and they have lost 10 per cent of land usage to the effects of war.
"This is war. Pure, brutal war," Dozba said, speaking by video at a think-tank event in Washington hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"[Ukrainian citizens are] like in medieval times having to go to war to defend their own country. … This, all together, creates a big, big mess."
All this in a region that last year exported one-quarter of the world's wheat, 10 per cent from Ukraine and 16 per cent from Russia.
Ukraine is an even bigger exporter than Russia of corn, barley, sunflower seed and rapeseed oil, and Russia is a top fertilizer producer, the second-largest in the world after Canada.
Things weren't easy last year: numerous countries had already been forced to cut wheat imports because of high prices.
The UN had already estimated world hunger hit a 15-year high because of the pandemic and now says it's about to get worse.
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