Ukraine war leads to a global food crisis

The UN warned of “catastrophic” consequences for the child malnutrition in the poorest countries and since last March there have been protests related to price increases in Peru, Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Tunisia, Kenya, Cyprus and Greece. Analysts do not rule out that the following will be new massive population movements, when the most affected populations begin to emigrate to survive.

A record never seen

The Egyptian Abeer Etepa, of the World Food Program (WFP), does not use diplomatic terms to describe the situation. “We are facing a dramatic record never seen before since world hunger is recorded with data,” she says, in an interview with this newspaper.

Depending on the organization you are a part of, 276 million people in 81 countries were severely food insecure (people who have gone a day or more without eating) in early 2022, a number that doubled in two years of the pandemic and the climate crisis. To these, we must now add another 47 million (equivalent to the population of Spain) of citizens who are at risk of finding themselves in the same condition if the conflict in Ukraine does not end.

It is an “unprecedented” food crisis”, as highlighted by Etepa, which already has its first victims in: countries that are high consumers of food such as wheat, that produce less than they consume, and do not have enough resources to face price increases for different reasons, including suffering from armed conflicts, severe political turmoil and structural inequality. A large part of these are located on the African continent (in particular, Niger, Somalia, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Egypt, among others; others with entrenched wars or prolonged socioeconomic crises (such as Yemen, Syria , Lebanon, Mali and Pakistan).

In Latin America, the WFP regional office recently also placed special emphasis on the damage caused by the shortage of three of the most used fertilizers (nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium) in local agriculture. The reason for this lack: Russia is one of the main producers of these fertilizers on the planet, and now there are difficulties for payments also because of Western sanctions against Moscow, according to experts. “These difficulties in getting hold of the fertilizers that Russia sells will little by little affect all of world agriculture, the poor countries, the rich, the large producers and the small ones,” says Mario Zappacosta, senior analyst at the Organization for Agriculture and Food of the UN (FAO), whose headquarters is also in Rome.

Less production and full silos

The armed confrontations in the Ukraine have greatly reduced the capacity of agricultural production. “Fields whose crops are mined or occupied (by Russian troops), could not be harvestedand the performance has been inferior”, explains Zappacosta, adding that this circumstance “has also caused a rise in prices due to the forecasts (of the markets) of future scarcity”.

On the other, “Ihe silos in Ukraine are full of previous harvests, but they are not being emptied due to the blockade (by Russia) of the ports in southern Ukraine, which is why they are opting for land transport with trucks, which is much slower and is causing traffic jams at the borders”, argues the analyst. Some sources estimate that there are some 22 million tons of cereal and grains that are blocked in the country.

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The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), another UN agency that closely follows these phenomena, also agrees with the analysis. “Russia and Ukraine account for about a third of world wheat exports, and supply countries in the Middle East and North Africa with more than half of their grain supplies. 85% of Egypt’s wheat imports come from the Black Sea region,” the organization explained. To further complicate matters, India, another of the world’s largest wheat producers, suspended its exports of this food in May due to an excessive heat wave.

The spectrum is, therefore, once again that of the ‘butterfly effect’, that is, in this case, that of social revolts (as, at the time, occurred with the so-called Arab Springs in Egypt and Tunisia), originating in discontent citizen also fed by the food shortage suffered by citizens in the countries most affected by the phenomenon. But neither is it ruled out that the crisis could generate similar tensions in the most depressed areas of the most developed countries.