The untimely convergence of soaring temperatures, erratic weather and Vladimir Putin’s worldview through a lens of anger and suspicion means a lot more poor people could be going hungry in the foreseeable future.
The Russian president’s announcement earlier this month that he was backing out of a U.N.-administered agreement that had allowed Ukraine to export tens of millions of metric tons of food sent grain prices up as much as 17% in the first week, while sparking outrage in global capitals.
Korir Sing’Oei, an official in Kenya’s foreign affairs ministry, called Putin’s decision to cancel the Black Sea Grain Initiative with Russia and Turkey “a stab on the back at global food security prices” that “disproportionately impacts countries in the Horn of Africa already impacted by drought.”
At a summit for African leaders that Putin convened in St. Petersburg, he pledged on Thursday that over the next three or four months Russia would ship free grain to six African nations.
“We are taking maximum efforts to avert a global food crisis,” said Putin, an accused war criminal trying to burnish his country’s soiled image. Moscow, he said, would ship as much as 50,000 tons of grain to Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Eritrea and the Central African Republic.
Speaking at Putin’s summit, however, the head of the 55-nation African Union, Comoros President Azali Assoumani, called on Russia to return to the Ukraine grain agreement, which was brokered by Turkey and the United Nations.
"The problem of grains and fertilizers concerns everyone," Assoumani told Russia's state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called a second meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Council to discuss the "serious security situation" in the Black Sea region, after Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked for a crisis consultation.
NATO said it was stepping up surveillance and reconnaissance in the Black Sea region, including with maritime patrol aircraft and drones.
“Russia bears full responsibility for its dangerous and escalatory actions in the Black Sea region," Stoltenberg said. "Russia must stop weaponizing hunger and threatening the world’s most vulnerable people with food instability. Russia’s actions also pose substantial risks to the stability of the Black Sea region."
'Everybody, everywhere' affected
The U.N. remains in talks with Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and other countries in an effort to reinstate the deal that had created a safe corridor for Ukraine’s grain exports from the ports of Odesa, Yuzhny and Chornomorsk.
Since August 2022, the Black Sea Grain Initiative has permitted the export of 32.9 million metric tons of food from Ukraine, a major producer of wheat and corn often referred to as “Europe's breadbasket."
More than half of that was shipped to developing countries, including those helped by the World Food Program.
U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres dismissed Putin’s pledge to Africa and said that by keeping millions of tons of grain from Ukraine out of the international market, Russia was forcing up food prices around the world.
“So, it’s not with a handful of donations to some countries that we correct this dramatic impact that affects everybody, everywhere,” Guterres told reporters in New York.
Thanks to bountiful harvests in Australia and Brazil global markets appear to have adequate stores of grain, at least for now.
However, the effects of extreme weather events brought on by climate change combined with Putin’s termination of the Black Sea agreement could lead to commodity shortages and even higher prices.
Such a scenario would be devastating to low-income nations already facing food insecurity.
'We must stop nature's decline'
Against this backdrop of crises, including Russia's all-out war against Ukraine for the past 17 months, delegates from across the globe flocked to Italy for a U.N. summit this week on the state of the world’s food systems.
The meetings in Rome, home to the World Food Program and Food and Agriculture Organization, examined the environmental impacts of food production and how to make it more sustainable as the world’s climate changes and hunger and malnutrition levels rise.
Food production is “a major contributor to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution,” said Susan Gardner, director of the United Nations Environment Program's Ecosystems Division.
Agriculture alone, she says, generates about one-third of greenhouse gas emissions globally and is responsible for more than 60% of biodiversity loss as wild lands are tamed for pastures and farms.
"To top that all off, one-third of all food produced is wasted, needlessly taxing an already stressed planet," she said. "We must stop nature’s decline, in order to feed ourselves in the years to come."
