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--:-- Noelle King: For a hundred plus days, ever since Russia invaded Ukraine, we have heard the story and we have told the story that Russia is isolated. Vladimir Putin is friendless. His war of aggression is impossible to defend. But a meeting between Putin and another world leader five days ago suggests that maybe we underestimated Putin.
--:-- Maki Sal, the head of the African Union, is gearing up to hold talks with Vladimir Putin in Sochi on Friday. The Senegalese head of state is looking for a breakthrough. Putin has something that much of the world needs very badly, and he knows it, and he's using it to make allies.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up on Today Explained, how Russia turned food into a weapon of war.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for Today Explained comes from Adio. Adio is an AI-native customer relationship management platform that Adio says is built for the next era of companies.
--:-- Dan Charles: I'm Dan Charles, a freelance journalist and radio producer who covers agriculture and climate. That is a lot. Well, it's a big country. So think about, let's say you're driving across the United States. You drive across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa. Ukraine is bigger than those states put together. And a lot of it actually looks like the American Midwest. You know, it's a former grassland, like the American prairie, deep, rich soil. A perfect balance of sunshine and rainfall has the fabled Black Earth Belt of Ukraine, long known as the breadbasket of Europe, bursting with marketable products.
--:-- Noelle King: You go back in history a little bit, you know, before the Soviet Union, there were lots of little farms across that area. In the early 1930s, in the Soviet Union, that was collectivized brutally. Big collective farms were formed on that area. The Soviet Union's forced collectivization program was supposed to modernize farming, but it contributed to a famine that killed millions of Ukrainian farmers.
--:-- Dan Charles: Then, you know, the Soviet Union collapsed, as we know, and in the past 15 years or so, a lot of investors have come in, companies rented that land, and they are running big farms with modern equipment, and they are really very productive.
--:-- Noelle King: Look where we're standing now. This was an old collective farm in Soviet times, and now it's one of the most modern agricultural complexes.
--:-- Dan Charles: When there's not a war, how do these foodstuffs get out of Ukraine? They go out on trucks and train loads. By and large, they head to ports on the Black Sea, which, if you're looking at a map, is on the southern edge of Ukraine. particularly on the southwestern side. The biggest ports are in Odessa and around Mykolaiv. And from there, these ships would take that grain all over the world.
--:-- Noelle King: And so Russia began its war in Ukraine in February, which meant it was the middle of the winter. What would have been happening with Ukraine's food exports at that point?
--:-- Dan Charles: Right. So the wheat fields were actually planted already. In Ukraine, they mostly grow what's called winter wheat, which you plant in the fall, and then it goes dormant, and then it starts growing again when temperatures warm up in the spring. So the wheat fields were there just ready to grow. The other fields, yeah, they were ready for planting. The ports, though, were really busy because they were shipping last year's harvest.
--:-- Noelle King: I actually called up one of the people who follows this really closely. His name is Andrey Sizov. He's head of a company called Savicon. He really follows Black Sea grain markets. And he was saying, you know, the ports were full of grain ready to ship. Ukraine harvested a record high crop in 2021. It was exporting it very fast. Actually, we thought that it was a good chance Ukraine could become, again, number one corn supplier to China instead of the U.S.
--:-- Dan Charles: You know, when Russia invaded, there were still about 20 million tons of grain, both corn and wheat, ready to get loaded on ships. And so when the war started, did Russia immediately blockade those 20 million tons?
--:-- Andrey Sizov: Well, what happened immediately was ships just stopped because they were scared. Nobody dared to enter the Black Sea out of fear. Insurance companies jacked their rates up so much because of the risk that shippers said, you know, nope, you know, not gonna go into the Black Sea.
--:-- Noelle King: So that happened right away. I doubt strongly that a reopening of the ports could happen shortly because unfortunately this war it becoming an economical war as well. And I think that Russia will be interested in helping Ukraine and Ukrainian agriculture and Ukrainian economy and to reopen the terminals.
--:-- Andrey Sizov: That grain that's been stuck since February at the Black Sea ports, What happens to it? Does it rot? Does it go bad? Like, how urgent is it that it gets to where it needs to go?
--:-- Noelle King: There have been reports of, you know, Russians basically seizing grain and transporting it, you know, back to Russia. These new satellite images show what appear to be the ramping up of theft by Russia of Ukrainian grain being poured into the open hold of a Russian ship. It's unclear how much of that is going on.
--:-- Andrey Sizov: But, you know, the facilities, if they're not destroyed, that grain can sit there quite a while. Wheat is not necessarily going to go bad. The problem is there's another harvest coming.
--:-- Noelle King: At what point does it occur to the rest of the world that if this war keeps going, we're in trouble? When did that realization hit?
--:-- Andrey Sizov: It hit immediately. Okay. The clearest signal was people got scared that there was going to be a shortage of grain, and so they immediately tried to secure their own supplies, driving up prices.
--:-- Noelle King: You might have noticed at your grocery store that food prices are up. One item getting hit hard right now is wheat. In the days after the war broke up, wheat prices shot up. Same happened with sunflower oil. It has dropped since then, but it's still like 40 or 50 percent more expensive than before the war.
--:-- Andrey Sizov: And part of what's driving that is simply the uncertainty and the fear as countries or grain traders, you know, try to grab and hoard grain supplies for themselves. Is any of it getting out into the world in other ways than the seaports?
--:-- Noelle King: A little bit can find its way across the western border on trucks into Romania or Slovakia or Poland. But there are big logistical problems. Trains are complicated because there's a different rail gauge, you know, in Ukraine versus in Poland or Slovakia. And so stuff with the train cars would have to be lifted up and put back on different wheel sets underneath.
--:-- Mike Lee: I'm Mike Lee, a farming expert who's worked in this region. And he said, you know, a lot of people for a while were talking about transporting grain to this port in Romania that also is on the Black Sea. But he said, you know, just look at this route. You have to deal with crossing international borders. And then you get to the Danube River and there's a ferry. and the ferry looks more like a tourist ferry. I don't know, I haven't worked it out, but it takes, what, 40 or 50 vehicles at a time to shuttle backwards and forwards across the Danube.
--:-- Noelle King: Yeah, so it's just not going to work easily. He said farmers can store quite a bit of wheat on their farms and they will have to, starting a few weeks from now. They're going to start harvesting their wheat crops at the end of June. But then September comes and they're going to be harvesting corn and sunflowers and they're just really going to be piling up.
--:-- Mike Lee: The solution is the ports have to open. Mikhailov and Odessa ports have to open because that's the only real viable solution to export and grain.
--:-- Noelle King: Russia is saying absolutely not. But Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has been begging the West to break this blockade. And I wonder, how likely is that? Wouldn't that mean anyone who gets involved in breaking the blockade is effectively going to war with Russia too?
--:-- Mike Lee: That's what it seems like. And the West, you know, has not been interested in getting directly involved in fighting on land in Ukraine. We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine. So it seems unlikely that they do it at sea.
--:-- Noelle King: Let's talk about the knock-on effects. Where does Ukraine's food normally go? Who's in trouble?
--:-- Mike Lee: So a lot of it goes to North Africa and the Middle East. One of the biggest customers is Egypt. But the thing to remember is the people who are in trouble are everywhere. They're everybody who's already struggling to pay for food, right?
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up with Ukraine's grain stuck at ports, Vladimir Putin is using what Russia has and also what Russia is stealing to form alliances in Africa.
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--:-- Eddie Wax: I'm Eddie Wax, covering food and agriculture for Politico Europe. So Putin really needs allies. He needs allies obviously not in the West because the West has roundly condemned his invasion of Ukraine. And the West is trying to arm his opponents in Ukraine to the teeth. But the African nations, many of them are hugely dependent on their food imports. Africa imports more than 85 percent of its food, according to the UN, and Russia and Ukraine have long offered it affordable sources of food and fuel.
--:-- Noelle King: And now this war has really frustrated the supply lines going to Africa. Eddie, just to be clear, the foodstuffs, the oil and the wheat that Macky saw would like to come from Eastern Europe into Africa, that appears to be stuff that Vladimir Putin and Russia are stealing from Ukraine. Is that right?
--:-- Eddie Wax: Not all of it. I mean, there have been Western officials and U.S. officials, you know, warning now that Russia is stealing Ukrainian grain. This is not to belittle those accusations, but what it's also doing is destroying so much of the production of grain which precedes that.
--:-- Noelle King: North of Kiev, Andrey Korotkov runs the last operative farm within 30 miles. Do you think that they're trying to use hunger as a weapon?
--:-- Andrey Korotkov: I've seen it with my own eyes, he says. They bombed our storehouses, and when they leave, they steal everything. They often cut the electricity and the water supply, too.
--:-- Eddie Wax: Russia is bombing grain stores. They've been shelling farms. They've been killing civilians and making the simple logistics of moving stuff around the country impossible, which is obviously terrible for a country which relies for so much of its economy on agriculture.
--:-- Noelle King: Russia in and of itself is an even bigger grain producer than Ukraine. So it's not like Russia needs Ukraine's grain for itself. Russia is an absolutely gigantic exporter of grains and it exports far more fertilizers than Ukraine does.
--:-- Eddie Wax: And fertilizers, of course, are what Africa is going to need to grow its own food for the next year or two, especially if the food affordability crisis gets much worse, as many people think it will.
--:-- Noelle King: I imagine African leaders, including Macky Sal, have been confronted with the fact that they are buying fertilizer and grain from a country, Russia, that is waging a widely condemned war against Ukraine. Is it fair to do this? What have they said?
--:-- Eddie Wax: I think that their answer would simply be, is it fair for our people to starve because of a war in Europe, thousands of miles away, which has ultimately not much to do with us.
--:-- Noelle King: It's very tricky territory for the West. Western nations have urged Africa not to buy into Russia's view that the West is at fault for a growing global food crisis. Russia is pretending that there are massive sanctions on wheat, that it's damaging Russia's capacity to export food around the world. That's just not true.
--:-- Eddie Wax: I mean, the real reason that this food crisis stemming from COVID and inflation and climate change has got so much worse this year is because of Russia's invasion.
--:-- Noelle King: So let's parse these two different situations. You have Russia, which has its own exports. And then we know for months now, some 20 million tons of Ukrainian grain has been sitting there and not getting out into the world. Who is involved in trying to get this blockade to end or to get around it?
--:-- Eddie Wax: There are lots of diplomatic efforts going on, but the fact is, you know, from where I'm sitting today, I kind of think a lot of them are doomed. The EU's plan is almost the last-ditch plan. The EU shares a border with Ukraine. You know, several countries share a land border with Ukraine. So what the EU is saying is, let's ramp up the exports by trains, by trucks, and just get out as much grain from Ukraine as we can over the land borders.
--:-- Noelle King: But unfortunately, due to many complicated problems like the fact that the railways are different sizes between Ukraine and Poland, that's actually not a very feasible plan. And many people are saying that basically not even one fifth of the normal export capacity can actually be reached by this plan, which the EU has called rather triumphantly solidarity lanes.
--:-- Eddie Wax: And that plan also includes kind of trying to get the grain out into Poland and then shifting it north and getting it through the Baltic states like Lithuania, some of those ports on the Baltic Sea. and then maybe it can be shipped out across the world. So that's really a long route. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be logistically problematic.
--:-- Noelle King: And, you know, exports by land have started to slowly ramp up. I just don't think anyone's really that confident that it can reach the levels that it was before and the levels that are needed, especially with another harvest on the way come, you know, next month and come August.
--:-- Eddie Wax: And there's going to be millions and millions more tons of grain coming. And then the other big thing, which is making headlines at the moment, is this two-track diplomatic effort at the moment. The UN is spearheading efforts to broker a deal which would not only help Ukrainian exports get out faster but also help Russia export things.
--:-- Noelle King: You know I suppose that probably the way the UN is trying to get Russia on side. Antonio Guterres the Secretary General of the UN has been saying for a long time that there needs to be, you know, protected corridors created in the Black Sea. Russia must permit the safe and secure export of grain stored in Ukrainian ports.
--:-- Eddie Wax: Obviously that would require serious demining of some of those ports. And then there would have to be an agreement for Russia not to start bombing any of those ships, especially if they were Ukrainian ones that were using the Black Sea.
--:-- Noelle King: And of course, Turkey, which obviously has a strong presence in the Black Sea as well, and is a NATO member, is involved in another set of talks sort of bilaterally with Russia. But from the reporting I've seen, it doesn't seem like Ukraine is actually involved in those talks, those parallel talks.
--:-- Eddie Wax: So it's all very complicated. And I mean, the US has also sounded very sceptical about this, lots of these promises by Russia to guarantee the safe export of Ukrainian grain. And, you know, who can blame the US for being sceptical about that? because, you know, Russia said they wouldn't invade Ukraine for a long time. And then they did. So, you know, I'm not sure that word is really worth much anymore.
--:-- Noelle King: When I think, you know, most cynically, Putin is clearly this meeting that he had with the African Union chair shows that people are coming to him, they're fawning, they're falling over themselves to talk about the great historical ties that, you know, our countries have had and avoiding calling it a war and using all this, you know, language that's acceptable to Putin.
--:-- Eddie Wax: So if Putin's getting these countries in this situation, getting them on their knees to a certain extent, then why would he just suddenly agree to a UN-backed deal to reopen the Black Sea? Because it seems like things are working in his favor at the moment on that front.
--:-- Noelle King: Could other countries, let's say Ukraine's foodstuffs are stuck, rushes are only going to go to certain places if people, as you say, fall on their knees before Putin. Could other countries elsewhere in the world jump in and start growing wheat and making sunflower oil to make up the difference here?
--:-- Eddie Wax: Yes, the world's largest food exporters like Brazil, Argentina, Australia, the European Union, the US, Canada, you know, India, they can all grow more of specific crops if they have a top-down approach and the government starts to incentivize their farmers.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, here in the EU, for example, they've freed up a couple of million hectares of previously sort of dormant land and various countries are encouraging farmers to grow more food. But, you know, at the moment, there isn't actually, it's important to say there isn't actually a food shortage in the world. There is enough food.
--:-- Eddie Wax: Do you have an understanding of how much time is left to figure out a solution to this? Like how long from today until people in other regions of the world start starving because they can't afford food?
--:-- Noelle King: Well, people are already starving. The World Food Programme and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization are saying that there's going to be tens of millions more people pushed into starvation in the coming months of the coming years.
--:-- Eddie Wax: This is a swirling nexus of really bad things that are happening. Climate change conditions, droughts in East Africa, poor harvests potentially on the way in North America. If you're a government that's already coming out of COVID, you've got very little money to spend anyway. And suddenly, you know, food prices are rising. Where do you find the money for to keep subsidizing food to keep trying to bring it down.
--:-- Noelle King: People dying in their millions is terrible, and that is the worst that can happen. But ultimately, there could be these spillover effects, and that's what is the most terrifying warnings that certain political leaders are trying to give.
--:-- Eddie Wax: That's how they think that they're going to get through to people in Europe and in the rich West and in America. And that's by saying, listen, if there is all this instability and if there is all this starvation, that's going to have political ramifications, just like with the Arab Spring, which obviously there, there were food price rises that were happening and the imminent buildup to that.
--:-- Noelle King: On top of climate change and rising inequality, the Russian invasion will deepen poverty and increase in stability thousands of miles from where missiles and shells are causing devastation.
--:-- Eddie Wax: They're saying there's going to be migration, there's going to be political destabilization, there's going to be unrest, and that is going to end up on Europe's shores. And that's going to end up, you know, with refugees, nationalism, revolutions.
--:-- Noelle King: We shouldn't just think about this as a food supply crisis. It's not necessarily because there's a shortage of food, but it's because of the way that the world food system functions. And it relies on a very small cluster of major exporters, like 40 million extra tons of wheat can be exported from the EU, probably in the next coming year, a year and a half.
--:-- Eddie Wax: So that's important to say because it's not like there's just not enough food going around. It's that food prices are just going to get too high. And what's even more important than food prices getting too high, or what could turn out to be more important than that, is the price of fertilizer, which has already been high for so long, for many, many months, even predating the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
--:-- Noelle King: But because Russia is such a major exporter of fertilizers, it controls a lot of the trade of it worldwide. And the real threat is that if Russia can use this as a weapon, it can say, OK, we're not going to export fertilizer anymore. And all that would do is push up fertilizer prices even more. That would threaten food yields in the coming years. And, you know, then it's just one thing on top of another.
--:-- Noelle King: Our show today was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Tori Dominguez, and it was engineered by Paul Mounsey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
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