DEMOCRACY NOW
SECRETARY-GENERAL UNITED NATIONS ANTÓNIO GUTERRES:
While war rains over Ukraine, a sword of Damocles hangs over the global economy, especially in the developing world. Even before the conflict, developing countries were struggling to recover from the pandemic, with record inflation, rising interest rates and looming debt burdens. Their ability to respond has been erased by exponential increases in the cost of financing. Now their breadbasket is being bombed.
Russia and Ukraine represent more than half of the world’s supply of sunflower oil and about 30% of the world’s wheat. Ukraine alone provides more than half of the World Food Programme’s wheat supply. Food, fuel and fertilizer prices are skyrocketing. Supply chains are being disrupted. And the costs and delays of transportation of imported goods, when available, are at record levels.
All of this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe. Grain prices have already exceeded those at the start of the Arab Spring and the food riots of 2007, 2008. The FAO’s global food prices index is at its highest level ever. Forty-five African and least developed countries import at least one-third of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia; 18 of those countries import at least 50%. This includes countries like Burkina Faso, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. We must do everything possible to avert a hurricane of hunger and a meltdown of the global food system.
AMY GOODMAN: Those are the words of the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres earlier this week.
To talk more about how Russia’s war in Ukraine is leading to a global food crisis, we’re joined by Raj Patel, research professor at the University of Texas, Austin, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and co-director of the documentary The Ants and the Grasshopper, which focuses on agroecology, hunger and climate change. He also serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
So, Raj, together Ukraine and Russia provide something like a quarter of the world’s wheat. Can you talk about how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is threatening the Global South?
RAJ PATEL: Well, you’re quite right, Amy. Between Russia and Ukraine, about 28% of the global wheat trade, measured by weight, comes from Russia and Ukraine. So, for some countries, like, for example, Eritrea — Eritrea imports 100% of its wheat from the combined sources of Russia and Ukraine. But it’s not just countries that import wheat directly from these countries that are feeling the impact, because, you know, what will happen is that with the absence of these stocks available, the global price in wheat will go up, and countries will try and source that wheat from other places. But what that means is that, globally, the price of wheat is going up and that the shocks of the Ukraine invasion get propagated everywhere. And that’s how you will be able to see an increase in hunger as a result of this.
The United Nations has been modeling that now the global number of people who are suffering undernutrition will hit possibly 830 million people. And that’s driven by price increases, as you mentioned before, of up to 22% in global wheat markets. So what’s happening is that once the supply becomes uncertain, global markets price in the uncertainty. You see wheat trading at incredibly high levels, hitting record levels earlier on this month. And that means that with high prices, you’re likely to see the kind of instability that the secretary-general was mentioning earlier on.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about how the seasons work right now. I mean, we’re moving into, in just a few weeks, what would be planting season right in Ukraine and Russia.
RAJ PATEL: Right. And so, what we’re seeing at the moment is that farmers — I mean, you may have seen some footage of farmers trying to get into their fields and to access some of the wheat, some of the winter wheat, that’s been ready for harvest, and getting ready for spring planting. All of that becomes much less certain. And again, that uncertainty propagates worldwide because of the other commodity that is under threat here or that’s affected, and that’s fertilizer. As you mentioned in the introduction, Russia is the world’s largest nitrogen fertilizer exporter, and it is also a significant exporter of potash and phosphorus. All of these are things that industrial agriculture requires in order to be able to get the yields that we’re accustomed to.
With the price of all these fertilizers going up, it’s not just farmers in Ukraine who are suffering the impact. Globally, farmers who were dependent on these fertilizers are starting to make decisions about planting spring crops, for instance, in North America. And the supply response isn’t as robust as one might think. You know, it’s not as if farmers are heading off into the fields and deciding that they’re going to cover everything with wheat, in large part because it’s going to be expensive to fertilize that, and also in large part because we’re already seeing a drought in large parts of the Wheat Belt, spurred by climate change. And so, the sort of combination of the global network of international commodity prices driving up the prices everywhere mean that farmers are thinking twice about whether to vastly increase the number of acres they have under wheat production.
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