Before the war broke out in Ukraine, Angelica, a resident of the Zaikovka neighborhood in KharkivHe did not worry about feeding his children. She had a job, food and, although she was not rich by any means, she lived “well” and had “enough money”, according to her own account. “But now I have lost my job as a clerk in a store in the city, because most of the shops have closed, and nobody knows when they will reopen,” she explains before she is also not getting adequate help “because of the chaos what’s in it food distribution“.
Angelica’s hardships are an example that highlights the great Ukrainian paradoxa country that the world knows for being one of the barns of the planet, but where now the once thriving food industry has been overtaken by conflict. The farmers of Zaporiya who plow the fields with helmets Y bulletproof veststhe elderly in difficulties due to the rise in prices of the products of the basic basket, and the long convoys of tractors and agricultural machinery that in these months have been transferred from the east to the west of the country to prevent them from being destroyed or stolen, are also part of this snapshot.
According to an estimate of World Food Program (WFP)more than 10 million people, about 20% of the population of Ukraine, are currently in need of food due to the war started in February by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. “I am afraid that unless a solution is found immediately and there is a cessation of hostilities, the situation will get worse and more people will need help,” adds Brian Bogart, WFP’s deputy emergency coordinator in Ukraine.
farms attacked
In fact, it is enough to look at the map of the regions most affected by the fighting in the east and south of Ukraine, which in many cases coincide with the most agricultural areas of Ukraine, to find answers to why this country today has difficulties in meeting demand. internal and external food. The oblasts (regions) of Kharkiv, Dnipro and Zaporizhia in eastern Ukraine – along with Vinnitsa and Odessa in the west – are the areas that, under normal circumstances, would produce the largest amount of wheat in the country. However, now the performance of the fields is no longer what it used to be.
The farms Ukrainian women have also been attacked. In Malaya Rohan, a town near Kharkov, several installations were left completely unusable after weeks of fighting between the Ukrainian and Russian armies, and their recovery will, in all likelihood, take a long time. In another town, Shestakove, located in this same area, a dairy farm was also the victim of an attack that seriously damaged it.
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In Rubizhne, in Lugansk – in Donbas where the most violent clashes are currently taking place – satellite images from the private observation company Planet illustrated at the end of April the large crater that emerged after a bombardment on a farm used by a multinational, and whose grain storage silo was also completely ruined. And also in the city of Synelnykove, in the Dnipro region, where cameras even captured the moment when a rocket hit a grain elevator in May.
Still, these scenarios are not a complete surprise to experts. Already in 2014, an analysis carried out by the scientific journal Food Safety analyzed the Ukrainian case when considering this country as one of the largest to cause global food crises. A hypothesis that is now reality.
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Eddie is an Australian news reporter with over 9 years in the industry and has published on Forbes and tech crunch.