The bloody battle for control of Mariupol has made headlines in the international press for the past week.
Faced with the failure of its initial strategy, which involved the quick and triumphant capture of Kiev, the Russian army concentrated its efforts on the occupation of the port city of 400,000 inhabitants. It is the gateway to the Sea of Azov, one of Ukraine’s two maritime trade hotspots, the world’s fifth-largest wheat exporter in 2019.
If the oil and gas industry is the most visible face of the war economy, because it organizes relations between Russia and the North Atlantic, the other, agribusiness, is perhaps even more important for
the future of the global south.
Russia and Ukraine have re-emerged as global agribusiness powers in the last 20 years, after recovering infrastructure left in ruins in the 1990s.
Together, they account for a third of global cereal exports. For Russia, controlling the Sea of Azov and Ukrainian Black Sea ports would put it in charge of around 30% of the world’s wheat production and strengthen its position in Africa and the Middle East.
In Egyptian Arabic, bread is synonymous with “life”, and the Black Sea region has been the mainstay of the Mediterranean basin since ancient Greece. But in North and Sub-Saharan Africa, at least since 2011, bread has also been synonymous with politics.
The Arab Spring, or the wave of protests that toppled regimes and sparked civil wars, had its origins in food price inflation.
If in the petro-states of Algeria, Nigeria and Angola the increase in grain prices can be offset by the growth in oil and gas income, all other regimes depend on Russia for their political survival.
Analyzing the votes at the UN, it is already possible to see that the food issue weighs in the calculation of the countries of the global south when it comes to taking a stand on war. Along with the information battle, which Russia is winning outside Western countries, wheat diplomacy is dividing the international community.
It remains to be seen whether Russian strategy will withstand the ravages of war.
For now, the trade tension revolves around the millions of tons of wheat that are blocked in Black Sea ports. But it is the impact of the conflict on Ukrainian productive capacity that will determine the price of foodstuffs for years and decades to come.
With its “special operation”, Russia turned farmers into refugees or soldiers. Your tanks are ravaging crops and your missiles are destroying infrastructure. It would not be the first time that the Ukrainian agricultural sector has been sacrificed.
The Holodomor was a politically organized famine by Stalin, who purposely starved Ukrainians in 1932-33 to feed the Soviet workforce in other latitudes and regions. Years later, Operation Barbarossa, in 1941, had as its main motivation the conquest of the cereal-producing regions of Russia by Nazi Germany.
We would be watching a repeat of history, but this time with 8 billion viewers-consumers.
