Farmers harvest with their combines in a wheat field near the village Tbilisskaya, Russia, on July 21, 2021. Photo / AP
The war in Ukraine has delivered a shock to global energy markets. Now the planet is facing a deeper crisis: a shortage of food.
A crucial portion of the world's wheat, corn and barley is trapped in Russia and Ukraine because of the war, while an even larger portion of the world's fertilisers is stuck in Russia and Belarus. The result is that global food and fertiliser prices are soaring. Since the invasion last month, wheat prices have increased by 21 per cent, barley by 33 per cent and some fertilisers by 40 per cent.
The upheaval is compounded by major challenges that were already increasing prices and squeezing supplies, including the pandemic, shipping constraints, high energy costs and recent droughts, floods and fires.
Now economists, aid organisations and government officials are warning of the repercussions: an increase in world hunger.
The looming disaster is laying bare the consequences of a major war in the modern era of globalisation. Prices for food, fertiliser, oil, gas and even metals like aluminium, nickel and palladium are all rising fast — and experts expect worse as the effects cascade.
"Ukraine has only compounded a catastrophe on top of a catastrophe," said David M. Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, the UN agency that feeds 125 million people a day. "There is no precedent even close to this since World War II."
Ukrainian farms are about to miss critical planting and harvesting seasons. European fertiliser plants are significantly cutting production because of high energy prices. Farmers from Brazil to Texas are cutting back on fertiliser, threatening the size of the next harvests.
China, facing its worst wheat crop in decades after severe flooding, is planning to buy much more of the world's dwindling supply. And India, which ordinarily exports a small amount of wheat, has already seen foreign demand more than triple compared with last year.
Around the world, the result will be even-higher grocery bills. In February, US grocery prices were already up 8.6 per cent over a year prior, the largest increase in 40 years, according to government data. Economists expect the war to further inflate those prices.
For those living on the brink of food insecurity, the latest surge in prices could push many over the edge. After remaining mostly flat for five years, hunger rose by about 18 per cent during the pandemic to between 720 million and 811 million people. Earlier this month, the United Nations said that the war's effect on the global food market alone could cause an additional 7.6 million to 13.1 million people to go hungry.
The World Food Programme's costs have already increased by US$71 million a month, enough to cut daily rations for 3.8 million people.
"We'll be taking food from the hungry to give to the starving," Beasley said.
Rising prices and hunger also present a potential new dimension to the world's view of the war. Could they further fuel anger at Russia and calls for intervention? Or would frustration be targeted at the Western sanctions that are helping to trap food and fertiliser?
While virtually every country will face higher prices, some places could struggle to find enough food at all.
Armenia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Eritrea have imported virtually all of their wheat from Russia and Ukraine and must find new sources. But they are competing against much larger buyers, including Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh and Iran, which have obtained more than 60 per cent of their wheat from the two warring countries.
And all of them will be bidding on an even smaller supply because China, the world's biggest producer and consumer of wheat, is expected to buy much more than usual on world markets this year. March 5, China revealed that severe flooding last year had delayed the planting of a third of the country's wheat crop, and now the upcoming harvest looks bleak.
"This year's seedling situation can be said to be the worst in history," said China's agriculture minister, Tang Renjian.
Rising food prices have long been a catalyst for social and political upheavals in poor African and Arab countries, and many subsidise staples like bread in efforts to avoid such problems. But their economies and budgets — already strained by the pandemic and high energy costs — are now at risk of buckling under the cost of food, economists said.
Tunisia struggled to pay for some food imports before the war and now is trying to prevent an economic collapse. Inflation has already set off protests in Morocco and is helping stir renewed unrest and violent crackdowns in Sudan.
"A lot of people think that this is just going to mean that their bagels are going to become more expensive. And that's absolutely true, but that's not what this is about," said Ben Isaacson, a longtime agriculture analyst with Scotiabank.
Since the 1970s, North Africa and the Middle East have grappled with repeated uprisings.
"What actually led to people going into the streets and protesting?" he said. "It starts from food shortages and from food price inflation."
Countries afflicted by protracted conflict, including Yemen, Syria, South Sudan and Ethiopia, are already facing severe hunger emergencies that experts fear could quickly worsen.
In Afghanistan, aid workers warn that the humanitarian crisis has already been exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, making it more difficult to feed the roughly 23 million Afghans — more than half the population — who do not have enough to eat.
Nooruddin Zaker Ahmadi, director of Bashir Navid Complex, an Afghan imports company, said that prices were rising across the board. It took him five days in Russia this month to find cooking oil. He bought 15litre cartons for US$30 each and will sell them at the Afghan market for US$35. Before the war, he sold them for US$23.
"The United States thinks it has only sanctioned Russia and its banks," he said. "But the United States has sanctioned the whole world."
For the global food market, there are few worse countries to be in conflict than Russia and Ukraine. Over the past five years, they have together accounted for nearly 30 per cent of the exports of the world's wheat; 17 per cent of corn; 32 per cent of barley, a crucial source of animal feed; and 75 per cent of sunflower seed oil, an important cooking oil in some parts of the world.
Russia has largely been unable to export food because of sanctions that have effectively cut it off financially. Ukraine, meanwhile, has been cut off physically. Russia has blocked the Black Sea for exports, and Ukraine lacks enough rail cars to transport food over land.
What is now becoming more worrisome is the next harvest, particularly in Ukraine. On March 11, Ukraine's agriculture minister begged allies for 1,900 rail cars of fuel, saying that the country's farms had run out after supplies were diverted to the military. Without that fuel, he said, Ukrainian farmers would be unable to plant or harvest.
There are other hurdles. The United Nations estimated that up to 30 per cent of Ukrainian farmland could become a war zone. And with millions of Ukrainians fleeing the country or joining the front lines, far fewer can work the fields.
Russian and Ukrainian wheat is not easily replaced. Inventories are already tight in the United States and Canada, according to the United Nations, while Argentina is limiting exports, and Australia is already at full shipping capacity. Over the past year, wheat prices are up 69 per cent. Among other major food exports of Russia and Ukraine, corn prices are up 36 per cent and barley 82 per cent.
The war also threatens another longer-term shock to the food markets: a shortage of fertiliser.
Matt Huie, a farmer near Corpus Christi, Texas, said that skyrocketing prices had already forced him to stop applying fertiliser to the grazing fields that nourish his hundreds of cows, assuring that they will be skinnier come slaughter. Now he is worried he will have to also reduce fertiliser for his next corn crop, which would slash its yield.
"We've gotten into uncharted territory," he said.
Russia is the world's largest fertiliser exporter, providing about 15 per cent of the world supply. This month, just as farmers around the world prepared for planting, Russia told its fertiliser producers to halt exports. Sanctions already were making such transactions difficult.
Sanctions also have hit Russia's closest ally, Belarus, a leading producer of potash-based fertiliser, critical for many major crops, including soybeans and corn. But even before the Ukraine war, Belarus' fertiliser exports were blocked because of sanctions over its seizure of an expatriate dissident who had been a passenger in a Ryanair jetliner forced to land in the country.
In another ominous signal to fertiliser customers, earlier this month European fertiliser producers said they were slowing or halting production because of soaring energy prices. Many fertilisers are made with natural gas.
The world's major fertilisers have now more than doubled or tripled in price over the past year.
Brazil, the world's largest producer of soybeans, purchases nearly half its potash fertiliser from Russia and Belarus. It now has just three months of stockpiles left. The national soybean farmers association has instructed members to use less fertiliser, if any, this season. Brazil's soybean crop, already diminished by a severe drought, is now likely to be even smaller.
"They're preventing fertilisers from getting to producing countries," said Antonio Galvan, the soybean association's president, criticising international sanctions. "How many millions are going starve to death because of the lack of these fertilisers?"
Brazil sells most of its soybeans to China, which uses much of the crop to feed livestock. Fewer, more expensive soybeans could force ranchers to cut back on such animal feed, meaning smaller cows, pigs and chickens — and higher prices for meat.
John Bakehouse, a corn and soybean farmer in Hastings, Iowa, said he prepaid for fertiliser late last year because he worried about a looming shortage.His fertiliser still has not arrived, and he now has less than a month to apply it to his corn crop. Without it, he said, his yields would be halved.
"You know when they show the cars jumping in slow motion and the passengers inside are up in the air? That's what it feels like," he said. "We're all just kind of suspended in the air, waiting for the car to land. Who knows if it's going to be a nice, gentle landing or if it's going to be a nosedive into the ditch."
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jack Nicas
Photographs by: Brendan Hoffman, Victor J Blue
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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