Famine fears grow over Russian blockade of the Black Sea

Endless wheat fields near Odessa in southwest Ukraine herald a bountiful harvest, but Dimitri Matuliak can only imagine how many people could starve to death.

The war has been tough for the 62-year-old farmer. On the first day of the invasion, a bombing hit one of its warehouses, reducing to ashes about 400 tons of animal feed.

“My voice trembles and tears come back to my eyes because of the number of people I know who have died, how many family members are suffering and how many have gone into exile,” he told AFP. But the worst could be yet to come.

Stationed on the Crimean peninsula after its annexation in 2014, the Russians have yet to land on Odessa’s beaches as feared, but their Black Sea blockade causes economic devastation in Ukraine and threatens famine in many other places.

Granaries and ports across Ukraine are overflowing with millions of tons of grain with no export destination due to the Russian siege that is slowly suffocating the country.

In temperate southern Ukraine, the summer harvest is expected to begin in the coming weeks, but few know where the wheat will be stored this season, fueling fears that much of the grain and other products will spoil.

“It’s brutal for a country to waste food like this and other people to be poor and hungry,” says Matuliak. “It’s an atrocity, it’s savage. There’s no other way to say it,” he adds.

‘Food insecurity’

While the focus is on the battle in eastern Ukraine, the blockade of the Black Sea could trigger wider consequences for food prices and famine.

Before the invasion, Ukraine was one of the world’s breadbaskets, exporting 4.5 million tons of agricultural products a month, including 12% of the world’s wheat, 15% of the world’s corn and half of the sunflower oil.

The war and the blockade of Ukraine’s only sea outlet caused the collapse of trade, as alternative routes by road or rail cannot absorb the volume of goods.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres was unequivocal about this, warning last week that the war “threatens to plunge tens of millions of people into food insecurity”.

So far, around 20 million tonnes of food products have been blocked in Ukraine, according to local officials.

In southern Odessa, the crisis is palpable. The port has been empty, with no entrances or exits for months.

For generations, the economic power of Eastern Europe’s fertile agricultural centers was concentrated in Odessa, with its sprawling harbor and rail link connecting the region’s wheat fields to the coast.

Now Odessa’s port and warehouses store more than four million tons of grain, all from the latest harvest.

“We won’t be able to store the new crop, that’s the problem,” says Mayor Gennady Trukhanov.

“People will simply starve” if the lockdown continues, he warns.

Weapons against the blockade

Ukraine’s economy was devastated. The World Bank estimates that the war and naval blockade will cause a 45% drop in Gross Domestic Product this year.

Although on land the Ukrainian troops demonstrated their resistance against a better equipped enemy, at sea Russian superiority is almost total.

“Unfortunately, Ukraine has traditionally ignored the issue of maritime security,” explained former Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodniuk in a report published by the Atlantic Council.

“The democratic world has accepted the challenge of arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression on land, but international involvement in maritime warfare is more limited,” he added.

Over the weekend, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the world to intervene and called for “relevant weapons” to break the blockade.

“There will be a food crisis if we don’t unblock Ukraine’s routes, if we don’t help the countries in Africa, Europe and Asia that need these products,” said the president.

But even with these weapons, it could take months or years to reactivate trade if the war is still ongoing, as shipping companies are unlikely to send their ships to an area of ​​active conflict.

For farmers like Matuliak, who were born in the Soviet Union and had “fraternal” ties to Russia, war is hard to accept.

“Of course, it would be nice if all these issues could be resolved through diplomatic and peaceful means,” he says. “But we’ve already seen that Russia doesn’t understand the normal values ​​that people have,” she adds.

EU Von der Leyen says Russia is using food supply as a weapon

Russia is using the food supply as a weapon with global repercussions, acting in the same way as in the energy sector, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said on Tuesday.

Speaking at the annual World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, she said that “global cooperation” was the “antidote to Russia’s blackmail”.

“In Russian-occupied Ukraine, the Kremlin army is confiscating grain stockpiles and machinery… And Russian warships in the Black Sea are blocking Ukrainian ships full of wheat and sunflower seeds,” added von der Leyen.

The EU has pledged to open up alternative logistical routes to help Ukraine export grain. Agriculture ministers from EU countries meet in Brussels on Tuesday to discuss progress on that front.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — and the West’s attempt to isolate Moscow as punishment — has driven up the price of grain, cooking oil, fertilizer and energy.

The Kremlin said on Monday that the West was responsible for the global food crisis by imposing the toughest sanctions in modern history on Russia over the Ukraine War.